Warning: This post contains spoilers for everything up to and including Season 5, episode 2 of Game of Thrones as well as for the book series.

For years, we readers of George R.R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire books have lorded it over viewers of HBO's Game of Thrones. The show is based on the books, so by and large, we knew what was coming.

We couldn't wait to watch your reaction to Ned Stark's surprise execution, to the battle of the Blackwater, to the Red Wedding, to Joffrey's poisoning or the Red Viper's eye-opening defeat. In our heightened anticipation, we may even have let a spoiler or two slip here and there. Sorry about that.

But TV-only fans, you get to lord it over us book readers now. Why? Because in Season 5, episode 2 of the show, the writers made a number of decisions that put the show on a radically different track for the first time — one that deftly avoids the massive storytelling problems inherent in the two most recent books.

So far, one character has died in the show instead of being improbably saved and sent off on an unlikely quest; another has discovered the target of her quest instead of wandering aimlessly; another got elected to a new role in a far more believable fashion.

Two fan favorites are off on a mission to Dorne together, a much better use of their time than the nothing they get up to in the books, while one familiar face returns at just the right moment instead of never being seen again.

In short, TV viewers win, because they do not have to slog through three thousand pages of what reads like shaggy dog stories. Their version of Westeros has a more condensed, more engaging cast of characters. It is the one I'd much rather inhabit.

It isn't that the show is ahead of the books — not yet, anyway. It's that it really has its storytelling act together.

In 1996, Martin published the first book, A Game of Thrones, the first in what was then supposed to be a trilogy, to critical acclaim. In 1998 came the second volume, A Clash of Kings, and lo, it was even better. The year 2000 saw the third book, A Storm of Swords, which was perhaps one of the most densely layered and consistently surprising tomes I've read in any genre. It took the HBO show two seasons to do justice to this book.

And then? Martin spun his words, and his characters spun their wheels. He sat in his home in New Mexico typing out page after page, introducing new character after new character into his world of Westeros but not really advancing any of their storylines –- and certainly not at his previous speed. A Feast for Crows came out in 2005, and it only contained half of the characters we’d become familiar with. No Daenerys. No Jaime Lannister. We knew nothing about Jon Snow.

In the introduction to A Feast for Crows, Martin admitted that the second half of his narrative had spun out of his control, and would hopefully be released the next year under the title A Dance With Dragons. In fact, it wouldn’t be released for another five years.

When it arrived, Dragons was filled with many of the same problems as Crows –- too many new characters, not enough continuity. In the words of one Amazon reviewer, "this 'Song' is becoming a noodling free jam."

We were introduced to a long list of names in Dorne, on the Iron Islands, at the Citadel, on the road to Mereen, and a whole host of other places, without being given much reason to care about them. Martin took exactly the wrong lesson from the success of the first three books: That we'd be interested in anyone that had anything to do with anywhere in Westeros.

Wrong. We're interested in anything that has to do with the characters we've fallen in love with, or love to hate. We want to know if they live or die; we want to know who will win the game of thrones and survive the winter that's coming.

The showrunners, David Benioff and Dan Weiss, have been far less self-indulgent. (And for good reason — if a book is only bought a million times, it's still a huge hit for the publishers. But if a show drops down to a million viewers, it's a disaster.)

Benioff and Weiss have taken different approaches to the books before. They've conflated characters and shortened stories; they've made inspired changes such as making Arya Stark the cupbearer to Tywin Lannister, rather than Roose Bolton, in season 2. But on the whole, they've been beholden to Martin's overall plot arc.

No longer. Now, instead of having a fake Mance Rayder burned at the stake while a real one suddenly agrees to become a spying bard in Winterfell, they simply burned Mance Rayder at the stake. His death matters now.

Instead of having Brienne of Tarth wander Westeros for hundreds of pages, she has found her quarry — Arya Stark and Sansa Stark — and been rejected by both of them. Her continued pursuit of Sansa becomes that much more poignant.

When introducing the kingdom of Dorne, the show gives us a familiar character to hang on to: Ellaria Sand, still smarting from the gruesome death of her paramour Prince Oberyn last season. In the books, her lines were spoken by one of Oberyn's daughters, someone we'd barely met and really couldn't care less about.

In the books, Jaime Lannister spends chapter after interminable chapter sparring and laying siege to holdout castles in the Riverlands. The showrunners, rightly, reasoned it was better to team him up with Bronn, who in the books gets into an inconsequential series of shenanigans at his new castle, and send them both off to save Myrcella from Dornish clutches.

And then there's the face-changing friend of Arya Stark, Jacquen H'ghar, who shows up in Braavos in a wonderfully rewarding reveal at the end of the episode. In the book, he sort of possibly maybe shows up in a different location at a different time.

In short, wherever Martin seems to be going out of his way to keep strands untied, introduce ponderous new strands and frustrate the reader, Benioff and Weiss are doing the opposite — uniting strands and delighting the viewer.

Delighting, of course, is a relative term in a gritty medieval world that is filled with despair and bloodshed. But there are certain rules of audience-friendly storytelling that have held firm for centuries, in tragedy as much as in comedy. By hewing to such rules, even when George R.R. Martin himself is hovering over them as executive producer, the HBO team is far more likely to take us along for the ride.

BONUS: Goodnight Westeros, a Game of Thrones bedtime story