Game of Thrones is an American fantasy television series created for HBO by David Benioff and D. B. Weiss. It is an adaptation of A Song of Ice and Fire, George R. R. Martin's series of fantasy novels, the first of which is titled A Game of Thrones. Filmed in a Belfast studio and on location elsewhere in Northern Ireland, Malta, Croatia, Iceland, and Morocco, it premiered on HBO in the United States on 17 April 2011. The series, set in the fictional continents of Westeros and Essos at the end of a decade-long summer, interweaves several plot lines. The first follows the members of several noble houses in a civil war for the Iron Throne of the Seven Kingdoms; the second covers the rising threat of the impending winter and the mythical creatures of the North; the third chronicles the attempts of the exiled last scion of the realm's deposed dynasty to reclaim the throne. Through its morally ambiguous characters, the series explores issues of social hierarchy, religion, civil war, sexuality, crime and punishment. It is the most recent big-budget work to have contributed to the popularity of the fantasy genre in mainstream media. |
 The series roughly follows the multiple storylines of the A Song of Ice and Fire series. Set in the fictional Seven Kingdoms of Westeros,Game of Thrones chronicles the violent dynastic struggles among the realm's noble families for control of the Iron Throne. As the series opens, additional threats are beginning to rise in the icy North and in the eastern continent of Essos. Conception and developmentThe series began development in January 2007. HBO, after acquiring the rights to the novels with the intent of turning them into an international cable television series, hired David Benioff and D. B. Weiss to write and executive produce the series, which would cover one novel's worth of material per season. Initially, it was planned that Benioff and Weiss would write every episode save one per season, which author and co-executive producer George R. R. Martin was attached to write.However, Jane Espenson and Bryan Cogman were later added to each write one episode of the first season. "The Sopranos in Middle-earth" is the tagline Benioff jokingly suggested for the television adaptation, referring to its intrigue-filled content and dark tone combined with a fantasy setting. In a 2012 study, the series was listed second out of 40 recent U.S. TV drama series by deaths per episode, with an average of 14. Traditional high fantasy is described as generally incidental to the series, with HBO programming chief Michael Lombardo finding the storytelling appealing rather than the low-key magic or the exotic milieu, in spite of the network's new developmental policy to "[take] shots at shows that we wouldn't have taken a shot at five years ago. Two series how already aired and a third due 31st March 2012. |
