"Game of Thrones"

Idling my way trough extended vacation, I found myself browsing trough collection of movies and TV series amassed along the way. Since years of overexposure to crime serials made me somewhat squeamish  and fed up with often used cliché where detective/policeman deals with mutilated female corpse from the very first minute (not to mention ever growing dependence on violence, blood and limbs cut up in pieces) I refused to watch those, no matter how successful or celebrated they might have been (see "Breaking bad" - here was nothing entertaining about it and I refused to watch it, after torturing myself with four episodes), I turned my attention to something I knew only vaguely.

From the very first, opening scene I watched "Game Of Thrones" with curiosity, quickly realising this HBO saga matches my beloved "Rome" inch by inch with spectacular production, fantastic costumes, great acting and breath-taking scenery. The main difference is naturally, the story itself - where "Rome" dealt with real, historical characters like Julius Caesar, Marc Anthony, Brutus and Cleopatra, this time around we are sucked in a completely fictional, quasi-medieval world with its own geography, seas, kingdoms and borders. Slightly reminiscent of "Lord Of The Rings" but without without magic (at least so far), this story has completely human characters competing for power amongst themselves in a world divided by classes very much like ancient Byzantine empire - we meet eunuch, intriguers, treacherous queens, poison-pouring servants, knight tournaments, loyal servants battling epic battles, exiled royalty, spectacular locations crowded with all sorts of people, in fact there are so many characters that I was occasionally lost in comprehending who is who and how are they connected. Perhaps the most fascinating of all is the confidence of script writers, as the story unfolds relatively slowly until at certain point the watching becomes truly compulsive and somewhere along the line I started thinking each episode was better than previous one - the fact that story usually jumps from one part of the kingdom to another made me dizzy occasionally (from the main king's capitol to the North and than across the sea just to jump back to protective walls separating the empire from still unexplained danger behind it) but it all connected somehow and each character has a logical place in all of this, so it is not something to watch with one eye, it really demands the whole attention.

Last night I had finished with a complete season one - it was so good that I actually wanted to re-watch it all over again. Everything finally came in a place and to my biggest surprise it feels like story had actually started just now, like everything that happened before was just a introduction to a real deal. There are countless interesting characters but above them all my favourite is Tyrion Lannister (real-life dwarf Peter Dinklage, who is the only actor from serial to actually win "Emmy" for his role) who is so cunning, intelligent and masterly manipulative that I truly love him and if anything happened to him I would be very unhappy. I actually have to control myself from reading Internet descriptions of future episodes - starting to watch second season right now immediately. Its one of the best TV serials I have watched so far.