TV critic weighs in on frequent fan concern

Matt Roush of TV Guide Magazine, one of the first TV critics to jump on the Game of Thrones bandwagon, answers a readers’ question regarding whether the TV series might catch up to the books.

Question: You recently sounded enthusiastic about HBO green-lighting the George R.R. Martin Game of Thrones series. Speaking as someone who loves the books, I am very, very apprehensive. And not for the normal book-translations reasons (“It will never hold true”, “They will get it all wrong” blah blah). I don’t care about any of that. My worry is Martin himself. If you are not familiar with the books, here is the short version of my complaint. Game of Thrones was published in 1997, theoretically the first of seven books. Now, 13 years later, we have seen 3.5 of those books. The “.5” comes from the last book, which was half of what he intended; he split the “4th” because it got too long and bumped the series up to 8 (sic!) predicted books. At the time he said that the “second half” was essentially written and would be out quickly, but that was in 2006, and nothing since. He used to update his blog on his progress, but nothing there since Jan. 2008 except for vague references about being stuck.

Martin is an amazingly talented and imaginative writer who started a fantastic series, but seems to have either lost interest, has bitten off more than he can chew, or just doesn’t have time. (A parallel situation happened with the fantasy author Robert Jordan, who resolved it by dying before finishing.) Reading these books is quite an investment, but I’ve had to accept that I’m never going to get the payoff. Hence my worry about a TV series which I would otherwise be very excited about. It’s bad enough that we have to worry about the premature ending of any TV show for the normal reasons (low ratings, low profits, whatever). But to add to this the unreliability of the author and it really makes this sound like a bad thing to invest time into.—John

Matt Roush: A fair concern, and one I share since I have chosen not to start reading the fourth book until the fifth is published so I can have a more complete reading experience. I only read the original trilogy a few years ago, anticipating the sale to HBO, and was transfixed, but also awed by its scope and range of characters; I often found myself ending a chapter and paging forward to see how long it would be—sometimes 100 pages or more—before I’d be able to return to a specific set of characters or narrative point of view. It is a daunting task to adapt something like this for TV, especially given that the end of the story has yet to be written, and depending how much of the tale each season eats up, the TV show could eventually outpace the literary version. (Funny you mention the Robert Jordan series; I tried that one, too, in the immediate wake of the Lord of the Rings movies, and when it stalled about seven or eight books in, I just gave up. I much prefer the Martin series.) But all concerns aside, I’m so excited to see this epic fantasy come to life, and on a network that can handle its adult concerns and support its ambitions, that I’ll worry about these other matters if we’re lucky enough to get to that point. Bottom line, though, a memo to George R.R. Martin: Get a move on!

Winter Is Coming: Although many fans have voiced their concern that the TV series will catch up to the books I just don’t see that happening. Martin is already very close to finishing ADWD which would give him at a minimum five years to finish books 6 and 7 (no more that seven have been planned, the reader asking the question has it wrong), even longer if HBO waits more than a year in between seasons, which they frequently do. Yes, I know ADWD will have taken him five years to complete but I don’t think the last two will pose quite as many problems for Martin as AFFC and ADWD did. I suspect (hope?) he will get them out in a somewhat more reasonable time frame, say, 3 years a piece. Besides, like Matt says, even if HBO does run into this problem we should consider it a positive thing because it means that the series is an unqualified success!

In a related note, Game of Thrones got a mention in the recent issue of Entertainment Weekly. It was an article entitled “Forget ‘More is More'” by Mark Harris about the recent trend for bigger and more epic film and TV series’. Here is the part about Thrones:

In 2010, “more is more” has become the prevailing aesthetic. In the 1970’s, PBS caused a sensation with the nine-hour Six Wives of Henry VIII. This spring, when Showtime wraps up The Tudors, it will have taken 38 hours to tell the same story. And HBO’s recently announced new series, the dragons-and-dynasties fantasy A Game of Thrones, derives from four (and counting) novels, each of which is so long that I swear they make your Kindle weigh more.

• Published on 03/15/2010 at 10:34 AM CDT
• Last updated on 03/16/2010 at 9:22 AM CDT