![]() ![]() I love the “Lord of the Rings” movies, but for the most part what gets adapted for movies and television is either laughably cheap-looking, more interested in fetishizing all the stuff about magic and kings and swords than in telling a good story, or both. Where I went into “The Wire” and “Deadwood” with a lot of built-in affection for their respective genres, I’ve never had much sentimental attachment for fantasy. Martin’s fantasy novel series “A Song of Ice and Fire,” which is trying to do for the fantasy genre what the classic HBO dramas did for cops, cowboys and wiseguys.Īnd for the most part, it works – stunningly well. The slogan’s gone, but HBO has been mounting a comeback over the last year thanks to new blood like “Treme” and “Boardwalk Empire.” Now comes “Game of Thrones” (it debuts Sunday night at 9), the expensive adaptation of George R.R. “The Wire” was a cop show, and “Deadwood” a Western, but both were so much more. Shows like “The Sopranos,” “The Wire” and “Deadwood” took stories and worlds that audiences knew to death and made them into something more – something grander in ambition, something richer in execution, something guaranteed to stick with you far longer than previous TV versions of that story had. ![]() It had been around for nearly 13 years, and it was taken out of circulation (or occasionally shortened to just “It’s HBO.”) during a fallow creative period for the pay cable giant, when it was very hard to argue that the post-“Sopranos” version of HBO was really any different from any other channel.īut at HBO’s early ’00s creative peak, the slogan wasn’t pretentious, but uncannily accurate. It’s HBO.” slogan into semi-retirement a couple of years ago. ![]()
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