Along with The Walking Dead, Game of Thrones is the hottest thing on TV these days.
It’s great to see that cable is still leading the way with shows that have depth and intelligence, and the third season of Thrones, which premieres March 31, 2013, should bring in enormous ratings. (The DVD / Blu-ray set for Season Two will also be out on February 19, 2013).
As The Wrap raved in a year-end round up, “No show does better spectacles. Actually, no anything does better spectacles.” There’s also been reports that Thrones is the most pirated show of the year, along with Dexter.
As The Hollywood Reporter and Torrentfreak confirm, Thrones was downloaded illegally 4.28 million times this year, and Dexter got 3.85 million downloads. As Vanity Fair tells us, Dexter was the #1 illegally downloaded show last year, but now Thrones is on top. (JJ Abrams’s Revolution, which should have big return to NBC this spring, also cracked the illegal download top ten this year as well).
To help build anticipation for Season Three, like it needs any, there have been several featurettes that HBO has been putting out, and Thrones writer D.B. Weiss proclaimed, “We always envisioned season three as sort of the place we needed to get. If we made it through season three, if we could do season three right, then it would all be worldwide.”
Executive producer Frank Doelger also proclaimed, “The expectations are very high for this season. I think we’ve fulfilled them.” Not to mention cast member Emilia Clarke also said that with season three, “The game’s been upped. There’s so much more danger, so much more risk.”
Entertainment Weekly also reports that the next season will get “super-sized,” where there’s going to be ten shows, and they’ll be a little longer this time. As Weiss told EW, “There’s almost another full episode’s worth of extra minutes spread across the season. One of the great liberties with HBO is we’re not forced to come in a specific time. We can’t be under 50 minutes or over 60, but that gives us a lot of flexibility. Last year we had a lot of 52-minute episodes. This year is a lot of 56, 57.”
Game of Thrones definitely has a lot to live up to already, but if it keeps up its quality control, it should continue an already strong legacy of great TV. Not to mention we’ll soon have Game of Thrones beer so you can crack open a cold one while enjoying some of the best that cable TV has to offer.
