Cougar Town - The Name Game

Jules: Good morning! I've been up for hours.
Grayson: I had eggs for breakfast.
Jules: What?
Grayson: Oh I'm sorry, I thought we were sharing incredibly boring facts about each other.

I never, in a million years, thought I would be trying to defend a show called “Cougar Town.” Forget defending – I never that I would genuinely enjoy a show called “Cougar Town.”

This is a very odd moment for me.

Let me preface – I wouldn't have given this show the time of day if I wasn’t coming off of a week hosting family followed by a week of being poor with nothing to do but sit on my ass and attempt to entertain myself. I’m bad at doing this without television, so I thought I would give this show that I had heard surprisingly good things about a shot. 

Good decision, self. If only all the other stupid hobbies I took up were as rewarding.

Game of Thrones 1x01 - Winter Is Coming

Tyrion: Let me give you some advice bastard. Never forget what you are. The rest of the world will not. Wear it like armor, and it can never be used to hurt you.
Jon: What the hell do you know about being a bastard?
Tyrion: All dwarfs are bastards in their father's eyes.

In case you all didn't know, I want to get better at writing about TV. I like TV, and I like talking about TV with people. So I'm going to try to make a weekly schedule for myself on this blog to write about different TV things, one of which will be an episode-by-episode look at "Game of Thrones." Because practice makes perfect, right?

I'm going to handle these reviews in the same way my TV critic hero (yes these sorts of things exist in my brain), Alan Sepinwall, does. Overall thoughts of the episode followed by general bullet-point items at the end. Spoilers ahead for all of those who have yet to watch the episode (no worries to those who haven't read the books - I'll keep the review clean!), and let's begin, shall we? 

Mothering for Those Terrified of Children - Excitment and Concerns for Game of Thrones

Sean Bean as Eddard Stark = perfect casting

Let me preface this by saying that A Game of Thrones was the first book I read for fun that made my brain hurt. Keep in mind that I was twelve and just getting into reading, and that while I got all the sex, murder and intrigue on some level, I was coming off of Tamora Piece’s excellent (but oh-so-fluffy) teenage heroine fantasy quartets. They... aren't the same.

So I didn’t really get how good these books were until I was older and re-read them. At that point, I began to understand exactly what the novels were about. Not huge cool wolves and dragons, but an intriguing and wide-sweeping political drama told through a multitude of narratives and in a ‘fantastic’ setting. It was still cool, but it was also a lot more meaningful than it had been back in the days of, ‘Yay! Magic stuff!’ (I repeat – I was a bad-ass back in the day.)

Point is, I have a soft spot for these melodramatic, emotionally pulling books of epic proportions, so you can imagine my delight (and slight terror) when HBO announced that they were bringing them to the small-screen on April 17^th. Delight because one of the most epic series of books to be made during our time is going to be put in just the visual medium it was meant for (movies are great, but for something like A Song of Ice and Fire? TV is so much better), with competent people in charge and a kick-ass cast.

Terror because if they mess it up I will be traumatized for life.