I had never heard of the books either. But I'm kind of a sucker for medieval/fantasy type stuff, so I gave it a go. I enjoyed the opening scene. Cool opening credits/title sequence. After that, it got a little bogged down as they had to introduce a lot of characters, families, allegiances, brief histories, and whatnot - but that's part of the fun I think. That, coupled with a few strange sounding names and the British accents and I got a little confused. It's sort of hard to follow when dealing with a made-up world with thousands of years of history that you know nothing about, but you basically know what's happening. Good actors. Lots of gratuitous nudity, f-bombs, some be-headings, and some other various sexually twisted stuff going on (especially the Targaryen story line with the brother marrying his sister away and the savages). I'll give it another shot. I enjoyed it. I agree with Invader3K though, it's pretty cliched in a lot of regards. And it was a tad slow - so far, not a ton of action.