<em>Game of Thrones</em>: Will Non-Fanboys Care That “Winter Is Coming”?
HBO’s new series, Game of Thrones, premieres on Sunday. This week, we’re featuring five different takes on the show, which is the first foray into fantasy for a network that has built its programming on grimly realistic stories like The Sopranos and The Wire. Atlantic correspondent Alyssa Rosenberg began the conversation, and The American Prospect’s Adam Serwer continued it. Now, Mother Jones’s Nick Baumann picks up the thread:
As fans of the Lord of the Rings books and movies can attest, it's always cool to see the pictures in your head faithfully (or mostly faithfully) reproduced on-screen. So like most fans of George R.R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire novels, I knew I would probably enjoy a high-budget on-screen rendering of Game of Thrones. When HBO announced that it was making one, I was psyched.
Still, fantasy is a challenging genre for television. It relies on suspension of disbelief, and suspension of disbelief becomes a lot harder if television or movie sets
