If you've read all George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series, you don't need this post. But if every proper noun in that past sentence was gibberish, you'll probably need a little help to get into HBO's latest epic series.
On your side is the wealth of fan created information on the internet about this beloved series of books. Some have too much information to be helpful, but others are just what you need to understand.
The most helpful site I've found is HauteSlide's Game of Thrones episodal family trees/relationship charts. This site lays it all out visiually, and gives you proper spellings of names to search for in Game of Throne's wiki. Here's the tree from episode one.
The tree grows as the episodes introduce new characters, showing marriages, murders, children, friendships, threats, everything, even things mentioned once in passing, during a distracting sex scene. How are people who haven't read the books supposed to keep up without these trees?
Keep these babies close by during the early episodes and all your confusion will melt away. At least any confusion brought on by character's relationships. Confusion brought on by gratuitous nudity and violence is just part of the series, and it doesn't appear to be going anywhere.
First of all, let me say, I hate the name of this show as much as you do. In fact, I didn't watch the first three seasons, because I assumed, based on the title, that it would be a bunch of chumps, who can't dance, looking like fools.
Wrong. The basic premise of So You Think You Can Dance, heretofore refered to as "sytycd," is that these people can REALLY dance, in one style, but they have to dance in ALL styles. So a champion ballroom dancer gets paired up with a hip hop dancer and they have to perform a broadway style routine. The results are often amazing. Watch a street dancer completely nail a contemporary routine is breathtaking.
Check out this example from season 6. Jakob is a contemporary dancer and Ashleigh is a ballroom dancer, and they are performing a hip hop routine choreographed by Tabitha and Napoleon.
Plus it's the summer, what else are you watching on wednesday nights? And the pre-lims are done, so no more time-wasting, bad dancing, fools, just the real deal.
The show starts with 20 dancers, 10 male, 10 female. They will get paired up and unless one of them gets kicked off, they will stay in that pairing for the first 5 weeks. Each week they will "draw a style out of a hat" (however many styles are in the hat when their hand goes in, only the producers know). They will have a week to learn the routine and master the style. Then America votes and the judges pick from the lowest polling guys and girls to send one of each home.
The performance shows start this coming Wednesday, June 22 at 8 pm. The next afternoon I'll post my reviews (finally the copious notes I've been taking will be for something other than my obsession).
In the meantime, check out fox.com/dance to get to know the dancers and the judges.
