Game of Thrones S2 Preview
(Note: S1 is fair game - nothing major in S2 will be given away, until a special spoiler section at the very end.)
Being a showrunner is a really hard job. Doing it takes months of 18-hour days and years of preparation, and even then, that says nothing about doing the job well. For Game of Thrones, Benioff and Weiss have had the benefit of having an immediate roadmap and plot laid out, as well as a bunch of dialogue and character motivations spelled out for them. But they also know they have very little control - Ned has to die at the end of S1, no matter what, no matter what viewers (or they) think. They need to establish and flesh out dozens of characters, which is much simpler in a novel than it is on a weekly television show. In particular, the novels have a lot of narration and peeks into characters’ heads, and there’s no way to really do that in TV other than clunky speeches.
So when I say I think they did an excellent job adapting the first book of the series, I know how difficult of a job that is. And when I look forward to S2 (having read the book it’s based on), I see how much of a different challenge that is, and how it promises to cloud any discussion we wish to have about the series.
I just watched all of S1 in Blu-ray in about 12 hours, and I want to talk through it - what went well, what didn’t go well. I’ll also talk about some of the characters we’ll see, and what things a sharp viewer should be looking for. But more importantly, I hope to raise some questions that will inform how we talk about S2, and what the show really is about. Random thoughts, in bullet points, after the jump.
