I just finished season 1. I don't understand the hype. I liked it and the cast is fantastic but so far I think that the plots, arcs, and dialog aren't anything special. Imdb says there are nine noble families. Nine? That a silly amount of stuff to keep track of. I feel like I'll need a conspiracy theory like board with red string so I can keep track of everything. But that's more of a commitment than I want to make.
And I was surprised that there's some formulaic stuff make reddit and reddit-like audience cheer. The fucking scenes seem almost funny to me. They are so fake and wooden. I assume the wolf dogs are in the books but in season 1 - they seem less scary and more like a cool plot device.
At Imdb it has a rating of 9.2/10 • 2.2m. I can't believe it has millions of ratings but it's still above 9. I think the series is has an effectively higher rating than The Sopranos which is 9.2/10 but it only has has 1/5th has many ratings.
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How can it be so highly rated?
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What would you rate the series as a whole?
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Why do people love this series so much?
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Is season 1 typical of the series? Worse? Better?
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How do you rank the seasons best to worst?
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Is there more dialog that needs subtitles? I don't like that at all. I don't want to read subtitles for a fantasy series.
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Is the finale even worse than The Sopranos'?
Good characters, complicated story interactions, plenty of sex and violence for the hoi polloi. It has all the ingredients of "premium TV" so everyone laps it up.
First four seasons are pretty faithful adaptations of the first three-ish books. As soon as they run out of book material it starts to run off of the rails pretty fast.
Speaking for myself, I enjoy it because I enjoy the world building of Westeros. GRRM has plenty of faults as a writer, but the books have a coherent history and political landscape with minimal "because magic" answers to things. Contrasting with something like LOTR, ASOIAF feels like it's filled with real people with foibles and is cynical about the concept of monarchy as a whole.
4-5. Season one is an almost direct adaptation of the book and exists largely to set the stage, establish narrative rules (i.e. even "heroes" like Bran and Ned Stark aren't safe), and introduce the first round of a huge cast of characters. Seasons 2-4 kick the narrative into gear and are still faithful to the books with changes made for dramatic license that largely work fine as an adaptation. This is my favorite period of the show. You get many of the most shocking and iconic moments and get the most invested in the show. 5-6 start stretching things out with questionable deviations from the books. Seasons 7 and 8 are, as others have pointed out, flanderized messes that betray most of the character and narrative work that had been set up. A recurring joke is that the show traded porn-level nudity for porn-level writing.
Season 1 is very Dothraki heavy with subtitles, but it gets less so later on. I have a rip with no subs and it is funny how much you need them to understand what's happening in Dany's early story. Crafting formal fantasy languages is a legacy from Tolkien that they leaned into a little heavily early on, probably to establish bona fides with viewers.
People will debate the validity of The Sopranos finale, but GoT has objectively one of the worst finales in the history of the medium. It's painfully obvious that the show runners were just checking boxes and filling production quotas so they could move on to their next product.
Finally, the direwolves are dope as hell and get treated dirty at every turn in the show. They're essentially familiars for the Stark children rather than monsters and are interesting reflections for each of them. By the end they're totally abandoned in favor of boring dragons. Ghost is a good boy and I will not tolerate slandering of his good name.