HBO‘s ambitious, epic fantasy series Game of Thrones has been received brilliantly. Garnering acclaim from critics and audiences and holding fantastic viewing figures in the US and the UK’s fledgling channel Sky Atlantic.

It also picked up a terrific array of Emmy nominations, thirteen to be exact. That’s pretty fantastic for a fantasy show and it has already won one Creative Arts Emmy for Main Title Design. A second season was picked up straight away after the first episode aired and production is well underway.

Excitingly, the season’s directors have been announced and one of them is horror maestro Neil Marshall, director of The Descent and Dog Soldiers. This marks Marshall’s first time in television and he’s the perfect man for the job. Not only is the chilly, realistic sensibility of the show perfect for his directing style, but also is the exploitation elements of violence and sex.

His last film, Centurion, was a historical set film, like the show. Marshall’s involvement in the show marks another collaboration between HBO and a feature filmmaker. This is something that is not exclusive to HBO but is also a regular occurrence across popular TV which just shows the burgeoning power of the art form over film.

Of course, Martin Scorsese worked on Boardwalk Empire, a whole host of filmmakers from Peter Bogdanovich and Mike Figgis worked on The Sopranos, and Neil Jordan has The Borgias at Showtime.

And there are many more film directors (Frank Darabont, Bill Condon, Mary Harron, Alan Ball, Alexander Payne, Todd Haynes, Steven Spielberg for example) who have projects in TV. We’ve never had anything like this before and very soon I think TV will be valued as just as valuable and artistic of a commodity as films are.

Game of Thrones season 2 will debut next year.

Source: The Hollywood Reporter