'Game of Thrones' first impressions

'Game of Thrones' first impressions

SM*SH -PASADENA, Calif. -- HBO's "Game of Thrones" debuted Sunday to glowing reviews and millions of viewers, including fanboys dedicated to the George R.R. Martin books upon which the series is based.

Martin himself is as surprised as anyone to see the series get made.

"I was thinking they would never make this into a movie or television," he said at a January HBO press conference. Martin worked in television in the '80s and '90s, including on the new "Twilight Zone," the new "Outer Limits" and CBS's "Beauty and the Beast."

During that time he pitched the networks on original series, but he was always told his shows had too many characters and the budget for what he imagined would be too great. So he started writing books and began thinking, "I'm going to have hundreds of characters in giant battles and magnificent castles and they'll never make this in television or film but I don't have to worry about it. I'm just working in prose."


Gesturing to "Game of Thrones" executive producers David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, Martin said, "Now David and Dan have to solve those problems that I created, and I'm glad it's them and not me."

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For their part, the "Game of Thrones" TV series producers are happy to be working with someone else's creation. While large-cast, myth-laden series often spring up on TV, with a few exceptions ("Lost"), they rarely work well or survive (see: "The Event").

"One incredible luxury that Dan and I have had working on this is that we're not making it up as we go along," Benioff said. "We're going into it knowing that we have an incredibly well mapped-out, well-plotted storyline that's going to continue for, if we're lucky, season after season. George has already done so much of the work for us."
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