Ive returned! My old account (kevinbellamy) is still listed on here but Ive not accessed it since 2007 so it’s been… well, its been a spell. haha
I would post on here somewhat frequently. Some people may recall at one time I posted a link to a handful of spaghetti western wallpaper I designed.Sadly, that link is dead and buried and I didnt save any of the files. Bummer.
I’ll hush now.
Well, then welcome back, Kevin! 
But that is how his character works, he is not the main villain, just one bad guy amongst others, he is never supposed to be fascinating, to have a kind of negative charisma. He is the one really everybody hopes to be dead soon, and for that he is quite perfect.
GoT has so many different characters that every viewer is allowed to find his favourites and to chose those he dislikes. And there is a certain richness in that selection, and I think people chose those they like also amongst the more negative characters. At least I did.
And then there is a certain openness for change, especially that some like Jaime become more and more likeable.
And that’s why GoT became such a big success, cause the audience thinks that GoT has great characters and great storytelling. And a big epic sweep.
To reduce the success of GoT to sex and violence means not to understand how it works.
Btw, I think the broader success of a more complex series like The Sopranos had more to do with sex and violence, which was at that time quite a new thing in a TV show. There are many series now which are much more fixated on excessive sex and violence, without having in the slightest the success and influence of GoT.
The Sopranos is for me all in all also the better series, but GoT is the far more successful one. And it is for me easy to understand why.
My thoughts on the last episode or so of Game of Thrones. It’s a fairly unpolished piece of writing but it was originally just a post on a West Ham United football fan forum, which the site owner promoted to the main site as an opinion piece (indeed, the first and so far only non-footballing opinion piece that site has ever published). Had I known he was going to do that I’d have tidied it up considerably, but it gets my thoughts across anyway, albeit rather inelegantly:
… or not to give a shit!
It’s a TV drama, a soap opera, albeit one with a huge budget. It still follows TV drama conventions. It simply didn’t work for me as an interesting compelling saga, as was it’s intention.
Yes, it has strong soap aspects, like nearly all of the TV series, and it is more conventional than the GoT fans think, it follows mostly the usual rules (but not always), otherwise it would not have become that successful.
Still, GoT has lots of strong ideas and images, and can surprise sometimes.
If you like Sopranos check Canadian tv serie Omerta III (1999). It is almost unknown but it is easily one of the best mafia series/movies ever produced. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0149503/?ref_=tt_sims_tt
You don’t have to watch Omerta I and Omerta II to understand the story since Omerta III is not connected to them too much and the first two series are told from the perspective of the police department and they solve different cases. Omerta I is good, Omerta II is a mess, Omerta III is brilliant which is strange itself. It has only 13 episodes which is about the number I like the most for a tv serie with one storyline.
Just finished watching, ‘Game of Thrones’, seasons 3 and 4 …. picked up Blu Ray boxsets very cheap, and thought, what the hell, I’ll give it another chance - Well, what a huge improvement !!!
The sluggish pace of the previous episodes has been given a big kick up the arse … and loads of dead weight characters and their boring storylines get the chop … literally.
Not in a huge hurry to see the rest, nor have I become a convert as such, but with these 2 instalments, I can definitely see the appeal of the series. 
Those are the best seasons.
Ok …. does it go back into a slump after Part 4 ?
Season 5 spends a lot of time spinning its wheels and, at the time of broadcast, I thought it was the weakest season. Season six is really pretty good: It’s the point at which the TV show begins to overtake the books and, free of George Martin’s ever more diffuse approach, things start to really rock and roll. This comes at a price, though. Lots of things begin to happen too conveniently and too quickly, and whilst this is merely a slight concern in s6, it becomes a real issue in s7 and a fucking disaster by s8. The whole show becomes both more thrilling and more ridiculous simultaneously. Even as late as the seventh season, it still (for me) had the potential to be one of the greatest - of not THE greatest - show of all time. But that last season was the equivalent of being in front of an open goal before ballooning the ball into row Z. As a fan I still think it was a bloody good show, truly magnificent in places (many of which you’ve seen at this point and many of which still lay in front of you should you choose to continue, which I really think you should), but there’s no escaping the fact that it fell short in the end, and that the signs were apparent for some time.
All merely imo, of course. 
Thanks for such a detailed account … I will check them all out eventually. 
I finished series 3 two weeks ago, I might start the fourth series right now
Finished ‘Game of Thrones’ … Season 1 and 2 had really put me off, but the rest is great bloody fun, with much humour - Don’t know why fans complain about the last instalment, except that most of the really interesting characters are gone by the final episode … it’s a war movie / TV series, what did they expect!? 
Consistent characters and a coherent plot would’ve been nice. Swathes of the final season made little/no sense given what had been established already. What did you mean by “it’s a war series”? Did you mean that that’s why a lot of decent characters are gone, because they’re dead? If that’s what you meant then I quite agree, but personally speaking I’ve never been bothered by who was left standing (or not as the case may be) by the end. In fact I’ve always thought GoT’s fearlessness in dispatching its characters was a great strength of the show. It’s certainly not a complaint of mine. The plot being pushed happily through with dei ex machina which made little sense in context… nah, that degree of carelessness shouldn’t have happened on a show which had been worked on so lovingly up until the last couple of seasons. You could feel the writers’ eagerness to wrap this shit up any old how so’s they could get to the trilogy of Star Wars pictures Disney have commissioned them to create. There are still plenty of thrilling set-pieces to be found in those latter seasons for sure, and it remains one of my favourite series of recent years, but there was a disappointing lack of attention paid to the plot by the finish, and that was a shame.
I can better understand fan’s frustrations now, and I was aware of some flaws in the plotting - but as a casual viewer, cramming years of the GOT company’s work into a few weeks, i’m obviously less committed to the series.
Interesting for me to see Ian Mcelhinney, who played Ser Barristan Selmy. I know him personally, and he’s always been one of the very top Irish actors, shamefully under used, and a hell of a better actor than Liam ‘fucking’ Neeson - His character really went nowhere … so I did find that annoying, and wondered if HBO were contractually obliged to use a certain amount of local Northern Irish actors - another guy I know, got to play a Lannister for a bout 60 seconds, had one line, and then was dismissed by Charles Dance and never heard of again. Ahhhh showbusiness sucks!
It’s not the first major HBO series to cause controversy over the ending - ‘The Sopranos’ finale really divided fans also, as did ‘Deadwood’, recently revived in a TVM which really was too little too late.
Ah well, what ya gonna do!
Hm. Well, there’s possibly something to that.
You know Ser Barristan Selmy? That’s pretty fucking cool, right there! (and yes, I’d rate Ian McElhinney over Liam Neeson all day long, and I like Liam Neeson and that sole character he can play )
See, I thought the ending for The Sopranos was excellent but yes, I definitely recall it being problematic for many. I’ve only seen The Sopranos front-to-back once and tbh I found it to be to be good but not the all-time great everyone holds it to be, the dynamite ending notwithstanding. I’ve got it on DVD though and it could probably use a rewatch sometime soon. I wasn’t that impressed by The Wire The first time I saw it. The second time around, I loved it to pieces.
I enjoyed the Deadwood movie - maybe more out of sheer amazement that it finally happened than anything else - but, yes indeed, too much time had passed and it really wasn’t necessary any more. Terrible shame about show creator David Milch too, being diagnosed with Alzheimers just before he started work on the movie.
LOL … we’re not best buddies or anything, but he’s a nice guy, very laid back and not a pretentious poseur as so many actors can be. Last time I spoke to him was in a pub in Belfast, and to be honest, I didn’t know he was in the series, and he never mentioned it. I was asking him about a western he appeared in called ‘Blind Justice’ (1994) … I was telling how much I liked western movies, and I reckoned that he, Stephen Boyd and L. Neeson were the only Northern Irish guys to appear in one.
There were 7 or 8 people I know from Belfast who appear, but they all had miniscule parts except McElhinney.
Re- Sopranos … I was underwhelmed by the first few episodes when it first came out, but I went back to it and really enjoyed it a lot … though I do think it was terribly overrated. It too had some problems and duff episodes which seemed like padding or give the majority of the cast and crew the week off while we do one of Tony Sopranos dreams or hallucinations … boring!
I also like ‘Boardwalk Empire’, which i’m currently re-watching. But HBO seem to have now done this formula of power hungry characters and the betrayals that beset them, enough. So it will be interesting to see if they can top their greatest hits to date, with something fresh.
