Game of Thrones (or: Season of the Bad Hair)

 Been stocking up all these episodes of Game of Thrones on my DVR and couldn't wait to finally start watching them. (For those of you who don't know, this action/fantasy/sword-fighting dramatic epic HBO series is based on a hugely popular and successful series of novels by George R.R. Martin.)

Husband and I got to it too late the other night, so I knew we'd never finish an entire episode without his snores joining the soundtrack.  But here's what I have to say thus far -- sometimes even with the volume all the way up, their dialogue was difficult to understand (which may've been due to the various accents, or the fact that a lot of these words/names/places are fictional and unrecognizable, but you hear them and THINK you were supposed to recognize it, so you keep going back and listening over and over, saying "what the hell did he say? who are they talking about? only to realize -- d'oh! it's not a real place, nor a name or word we've heard before, so no wonder we're confused!  it's new information, and fictitious at that!) and we had to go back a few times to try and figure out what was being said.

I know there's a lot, I mean A FREAKIN' LOT, of exposition that had to be gone through to set up this world and the bazillion interwoven back stories of all the characters, so I am being patient.   And when I say these characters come more with baggage than back-story, that is a serious understatement.  It does seem like it will ultimately be a compelling and very cool story.

And it seems well-cast (Not loving Lena Headey as the queen yet, which bums me out, because I loved her in 300, and after initial ambivalence, grew to like her a lot in the tv series Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles; Sean Bean has a great commanding presence, and brings a lot of depth to what could so easily be a one-dimensional macho, warrior/patriarch; and as always Peter Dinklage manages to make his dwarf perhaps the most compelling of all the characters, and his performance never ceases to surprise.) There are several young faces unfamiliar to most American viewers, and I suspect this will turn out to be a career-changer for some of them.  A couple of the youngest actors have a ton of charisma and really hold the screen against their more-seasoned co-stars.

That being said, the actors couldn't do such a good job without good writing, and despite the heavy load of necessary exposition, it is intelligently written and pleasantly free of so many cliches that usually bog down this particular genre.  You can tell that it is driving somewhere, and it makes you wanna slog through the mucky trenches of all this set-up to get to that destination.  And that is also owing to some great work by the various directors.

But... can we talk about the hair???

Yes, people, the hair FUCKING MATTERS.  You spend all that money on those gorgeous costumes and those sets... and you shoot in obscenely cinematic locations in Ireland and Malta, and then, what, you get the worst wigs in the history of wigs?

Or just bad dye jobs? Bad extensions...? Just. Plain. Bad.

Honestly, the hair looks so misplaced on some characters that it is beyond asking me to suspend my disbelief.  It totally took me out of the story, that's how distracting it is.  Sigh. 

Not that I'll stop watching... 

***Note -- we have now watched three episodes.  We had to pause a few times to review their web of dysfunctional relationships -- "Wait, he killed whose father? Then he fucked whose sister? Then they stole the throne and she married the king but now they're fucking each other while so-and-so is stabbing so-and-so in the back..."  --  before continuing on with our viewing, because so much of this series is about what happened BEFORE the series began. Everything here is context, at this point.  The plots and machinations are meaningless, unless you understand their various histories with one another.  But let me say -- as I suspected and mentioned above, it is turning out to be quite compelling.  And dark.  And really, despite it being about kingdoms and sword-fights, and all the various shifting alliances... it is fundamentally a big, messy family saga of the darkest kind, with love of family and love of power battling it out.  The characters are well-drawn and complex, the acting gets better with each episode as everyone seems to be settling in, and yes -- there is incest and fantastical, darkly supernatural forces hovering on the horizon.... It's ALMOST enough to get me past the issue with the hair... Maybe in another ep or two I won't even notice anymore... Maybe.****

******Second Note (5/26/11) -- yes, I am fully addicted now.  And happy to say, I am  thoroughly enjoying Lena Headey's performance.  Guess it took me a while to stop seeing her as Sarah Connor.  And fortunately, because it's not TV... it's HBO!, you can get the episodes On Demand so you can quickly get brought up to speed.  This show is the REAL Brothers and Sisters, and makes the familial dynamics in that soon-to-be-dead Calista Flockhart vehicle seem utterly boring by comparison.  Get through those first two eps... and you will love this.***