The vast majority of the sets are great. The shots of the Wall—an ice-and-gravel structure that protects the “civilized” Westeros from ancient, frosty threats out of the far north—are highlights, as are the zoomed-out shots of icy Winterfell (home of the Starks, one of the central families in the series) and the somewhat Mediterranean King's Landing (the capital of the Seven Kingdoms, the realm where most of the action takes place).

Unfortunately, there are other scenes where the sets don't quite make the grade. The scenes that take place inside Winterfell's city walls but outside of its buildings have the feel of a sound stage, and some of the outdoor scenes in the rolling hills just outside Winterfell seem too cramped and zoomed-in. The most glaring problem, as Adam noted, is that the Dothraki wedding scene seems far too small-scale for a man who is his world's equivalent of Genghis Khan. The whole Dothraki storyline is almost certainly the books' most challenging (some would say “silliest”), and it deserved more—not less—attention from the producers, set designers, and actors to compensate for its shortcomings. Like Adam, I've only seen the first four episodes (Alyssa has seen six), but if the producers messed up the wedding, I worry about what they're going to do when they have to render dragons. They did a good job with the giant direwolves (easy enough when they're puppies who can be played by dogs), but an unrealistic creature can make the rest of the show seem fake.

The real test for Game of Thrones, of course, is whether it can gain an audience beyond fanboys and fangirls. One problem, as Alyssa and Adam noted, is that epic television series with lots of characters can take a while to get going. It doesn't help that the book itself starts slowly. My girlfriend is reading it now, and she needed 50 or 100 pages to get hooked. This problem isn't unique to Game of Thrones—I know several people who watched one or two episodes of The Wire and then stopped. (HBO hasn't really changed that much. They've gone from “Omar's coming!”—practically a tagline for The Wire—to “Winter is Coming,” the motto of the Stark family that serves as a tagline for Martin’s whole series.)

I didn't have trouble getting into the TV version Game of Thrones: As soon as I finished an episode, I found myself wanting to watch the next one. But I always knew what was coming next, and was wondering how the producers were going to handle it. I'm really curious to read what Eleanor, who has never read the books, thought of the episodes she saw. Did it suck you in? Were you curious about what happened next, or just confused about who people were?

I worry that many folks who haven't read the books, or don't read fantasy generally, won't find the moral ambiguity and general brutality of Martin's world particularly appealing. Part of the draw of Game of Thrones for fantasy readers is how different it is from the rest of the genre. But if you don't read fantasy, you might not care about that. Variety's Jon Weisman complains about the “complete joylessness in this world,” and he's only seen the first three episodes. It doesn't get any more joyful—but, as The Wire proved, and Weisman acknowledges, a great story can make up for a lot of joylessness. The story picks up as the series goes along—especially as the characters spread out across their world. But by then, it might be too late for some folks.