HBO Greenlights Pilot of George R. R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones

So the news broke today that HBO has given the greenlight to produce a pilot episode for a Game of Thrones TV series, based on the epic fantasy novels by George R. R. Martin. This is one of my very favorite book series, so of course right now I’m really, really … terrified. Terrified that a) the pilot will suck, and totally not do justice to the books, or, worse, b) that the pilot will be the most awesome thing ever, which will of course ensure the show’s immediate cancellation. “But why would they cancel a fantasy/science fiction TV series just because it was good?” you might ask, if you were extremely young and naive. Well, there’s actually quite a simple explanation. You see, the Knights Templar were not actually wiped out by the Church, as the history books claim, but were in fact merely driven underground, and later reconstituted themselves as a secret cabal who swore a blood oath that they would do anything in their power to see to it that any good fantasy or science fiction TV show would get canceled as soon as possible. Man, I hate those guys.

Anyway, I also think it’s kind of funny that Game of Thrones is actually being produced, when you consider a bit of history. You see, following the demise of the Beauty and the Beast TV show, on which GRRM worked as a writer, he spent many years in Hollywood developing ideas and writing scripts, none of which were ever made. Finally, fed up with this, and fed up with the fact that studio execs were always telling him that his ideas would be too expensive to film — too many sets, too many characters — he returned to writing novels, where you can have as many “sets” and characters as you want, and he purposely set out to take advantage of the freedom of prose fiction to write something huge and epic, something with dozens of locations and hundreds of characters. So what does Hollywood do then? Why, they want to produce that one, of course.