This show has a ton of characters. I suspect that there are others like myself who kept the handy dandy family tree guide from HBO’s website pulled up on their second screen throughout the first season just to keep everyone straight. The only way I’ve been able to tell many of the characters in the books apart is by imprinting the faces of the performers in the show deep into my brain. And just when I feel like I have a handle on all of them, the show introduces like a hundred new people that I have to get to know and tell apart from one another.
Amazingly, this show succeeds where others have failed. And it goes to show some of the things TV is able to do that movies simply can’t. The most number of plots a movie seems to be able to handle at once is three, maybe four in rare instances. The Lord of the Rings, one of the forebearers of shows and stories like Game of Thrones, had a relatively limited number of characters and stories.
A show can contain far more chapter-style segments, focusing in on a few characters at a time before cutting to another place on the other side of the Narrow Sea. One of the tricks to handling this many faces and names and life stories is pacing: allowing each scene room to breathe on its own, but not letting it drag on so long that we’re just counting down until we get to see Daenerys or Tyrion again.
By and large, this show has handled this issue extraordinarily well. It has also employed an additional trick: taking characters we thought we knew and perhaps didn’t care for, such as Jaime and Brienne, and making their story one of the most compelling of all. There is also the element of subtle changes to the story as it unfolds in the books that keeps the most avid fans guessing and as transfixed as someone watching for the first time. This is remarkable when you think about it.
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