Sean Bean is starring in this! I'm there!!!

The teaser wasn't particularly evocative of the novels, but I too have my hopes high. The novels were great, Devin's hate notwithstanding. The first volume was, for me, a bit slow to get into, but once I was there I was really there, and am now a big fan. The series redefined the fantasy genre, provided wonderful characters and stories, a level of intracacy and griimness never seen before in the genre, and were beautifully written. Don't fuck this up, HBO.

This, Boardwalk Empire, Eastbound & Down (S2) & Curb Your Enthusiasm (S8) are the reasons I just added back HBO. That's a pretty solid fucking lineup.

The Dink! The Dink baby! The Dink!

The books are eventually inane. I actually found the first one reasonably decent (GRR's on-the-nose and tell-don't-show writing style notwithstanding) and then over the course of the next two books it loses all sense of propulsion and interest. It descends into just a bunch of miserable shit happening. That's it. That being said I imagine you could adapt them into something a little more promising.

The novels were stunning, right up until the turgid, meandering mess that was A Feast for Crows. Here's hoping A Dance with Dragons pulls it out of the fire. In fact here's hoping he fucking finishes a Dance with Dragons. And the other 2. Jesus.

They get bad before A Feast for Crows. The third one is where the series descends into garbage. Because there becomes no point at all to the chapters anymore.

Chapter Whatever:
Arya and company walk and walk. Here's a description of everything that they eat. Someone goes and craps in the woods.

Next Chapter:
Daenerys meets some vaguely 1001 Arabian Nights-esque sorcerors. She witnesses their brutal competition wherein eunuchs or some such cleave each other to death with axes (because middle easterners are all barbaric, natch). She witnesses all ths with a detatched pragmatism.

And so on and so on. That's when they just become a case of G.R.R. Martin masturbating and not bothering to actually have any sort of story that matters.