Producers of serialized dramas hate spoilers and famously put cast and crew on lockdown to keep juicy plot points under wraps. But how do you avoid spoilers when your hit show — like Pretty Little Liars, Game of Thrones, The Walking Dead, The Vampire Diaries, Dexter, True Blood and The Secret Circle, all known for shocking twists — is based on a series of books? Your options: either mislead viewers, change up the story just a bit or take...
read more
HBO executives, while admittedly not the biggest fantasy genre fans, say they love Game of Thrones. Just don't try to get them to commit to it in perpetuity.
Reporters at the network's fall TV preview session Thursday did anyway, questioning whether or not the network would stick closely to George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire books on which Game of Thrones is based, asking if they might consider seasons longer than 10 episodes, and generally attempting to get a decade-long order for future seasons.
HBO announces fall premiere dates for Boardwalk Empire, Hung, Bored to Death
HBO, in turn, reassured and made no guarantees.
read more
Athchomar chomakaan, khal vezhven! (Welcome, great khal!)
After last week's Game of Thrones stayed firmly in Westeros, Sunday's episode (airing at 9/8c on HBO) returns to the land of the Dothraki, those nomadic warriors across the Narrow Sea who value a good piece of horseflesh for both riding and eating.
But we're not here to discuss Dothraki livestock recipes, as delicious as they may be. Instead, we shall delve into their language, a liquid-sounding tongue inspired by the limited Dothraki vocabulary, as seen in George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire novels on which Thrones is based. Executive producers D.B. Weiss and David Benioff, with the help of the Language Creation Society's mononymous Sai, selected David J. Peterson to create and expand the Dothraki language, which now stands at 2,763 words at the last count, for the HBO series.
read more
In Game of Thrones' debut, viewers met King Robert Barantheon, a laid-back monarch who seems more interested in wenching and quenching various appetites than in ruling the Seven Kingdoms. On Sunday, the show will give insights into the fat man who sits on the Iron Throne and the cause of much bloodshed to come.
"The thing about Robert is that he's not really a kingly king," Mark Addy, who plays Robert, tells TVGuide.com "He's really a guy, a warrior, a soldier who happens to find himself in a position of power. He'd much rather be with the lads. That's his roots, his heritage."
read more