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1st HBO Preview, 12 Sept 2010


Angel

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Sorry, Poobah. I have Sky myself, but I'm not psyched about this. The ads are going to kill any kind of momentum the show gains. Can you imagine an ad following the Red Wedding? Dear god! Televisions will be broken.

I don't think this was ever going to be a big hit in the UK to be honest. It's just too niche. Medieval politics, ok, fantasy medieval politics, errrm, fantasy medieval politics with a small amount of magic, whaaaaaa.

Hope I get proved wrong of course. Contrary to the impression given in this thread, it isn't 1995 and a lot of people have Sky, or, you know, an internet connection.

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I don't think this was ever going to be a big hit in the UK to be honest. It's just too niche. Medieval politics, ok, fantasy medieval politics, errrm, fantasy medieval politics with a small amount of magic, whaaaaaa.

I agree, I doubt it would have been a huge hit - the BBC very rarely give American shows prime slots so they tend not to get huge audiences. I suspect Game of Thrones would have ended up being more of a cult hit, as far as I know I don't think any HBO show (except possibly Sex in the City?) has ever had huge audiences in the UK.

Hope I get proved wrong of course. Contrary to the impression given in this thread, it isn't 1995 and a lot of people have Sky, or, you know, an internet connection.

Sky's most popular shows tend to have ratings around about 1 million or so, that's probably the best we can expect from GoT.

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...as far as I know I don't think any HBO show (except possibly Sex in the City?) has ever had huge audiences in the UK.

Seriously? The Sopranos? Deadwood etc? They were massive hits down here, so I guess we have no issues with American TV.

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Deadwood did not succeed in winning viewers over. Again, it's probably a case of it being on Sky. Whereas, the Sopranoes was on Channel Four and proved a huge hit. Can't think of any other HBO series that has done that well here, though. Mad Men, the Wire, Entourage, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Carnivale, etc. They all made/make small numbers here.

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Deadwood did not succeed in winning viewers over. Again, it's probably a case of it being on Sky. Whereas, the Sopranoes was on Channel Four and proved a huge hit. Can't think of any other HBO series that has done that well here, though. Mad Men, the Wire, Entourage, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Carnivale, etc. They all made/make small numbers here.

I think the DVD sales of a lot of these shows are probably more telling of the UK's viewership than their viewing figures on TV. Take Rome for example and most likely the wire. Lost remained in the UK's consciousness even when it did jump to sky but it's still true that shows do better on the "free" channels. For instance the ratings for Buffy, 24 and lost were far higher when on BBC or channel 4 than they ever were on Sky one (At one point I think the UK viewing figures for Buffy were higher than the US?). In that sense it would be nice if BBC/Channel4 (not ITV) were to get their hands on AGOT even if it is aired after the first season finishes as it will do well and usually drive the following seasons figures up for sky1.

Sky one is becoming more prevalent nowadays though. It's possible to get sky one as part of the "virgin" broadband/Cable service these days and you can essentially get it for "free" depending on your subsription deal. Sky will also treat the show with a lot more respect than BBC1 ever would have. It will get a regular prime-time slot, will be aired probably within a week of the US and won't be removed whenever tennis or snooker happens to be on.

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Deadwood did not succeed in winning viewers over. Again, it's probably a case of it being on Sky. Whereas, the Sopranoes was on Channel Four and proved a huge hit. Can't think of any other HBO series that has done that well here, though. Mad Men, the Wire, Entourage, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Carnivale, etc. They all made/make small numbers here.

(Mad Men is actually on AMC, not HBO. Not a big deal, but this seems to be a common misconception of those outside the US.)

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hmm.. i would think this show would do well in the UK. Familiar actors, familiar accent, familiar backdrops. The idea of a fantasy setting isn't that far of a stretch, aren't some of your biggest shows set around the fantastic (Dr. Who, Torchwood, Being Human)?

An aside, the most popular 'American' show in the UK when I lived over there was the Simpsons, there was like a three hour block on Sky where you could watch the daym thing... use to crack me up how much the brits loved that show.

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Lost's viewership dropped from around 4 million on Channel 4 to about half a million on Sky 1 (the finale got around 600,000, IIRC) and it's profile in the UK plummeted as well. Very few of the listings magazines made much of a fuss about Lost's finale compared to Ashes to Ashes the preceding week, which got about 6 million viewers of BBC-1 and an absolute ton of coverage. Also, whilst most of my hardcore SF fan friends followed Lost to Sky most of my casual-fan friends didn't bother. Of course, the fact the switch happened between the underwhelming Season 2 and the (initially) slow Season 3 didn't really help either.

The HBO shows with the highest profile in the UK were Band of Brothers (which aired with colossal amounts of advertising on the BBC), The Sopranos (Channel 4), Sex and the City (Channel 4) and now True Blood (Channel 4, although the FX satellite channel showed it first to tiny, five-figure viewing figures). The Wire is talked about a lot, but its viewing figures were tiny, only a few tens of thousands on FX and then just under a million airing around midnight on BBC-2. However, The Wire has been hugely bigged up by Charlie Brooker, one of our biggest TV critics, on multiple programmes and this seems to have driven huge DVD sales (passing 1 million DVD box sets of the series sold in the UK by itself). The BBC fucked up Rome as has often been discussed, so the first episode got decent ratings (4-5 million IIRC) and then it plummeted dramatically to less than half that by the end of the series, which for a prominent BBC-1 slot in 2005 was absolutely disastrous.

What will be very interesting to see about Sky is how they handle the HBO shows' greater lengths. Sky mostly show US imports which are the traditional 44 minutes in length with 16 minutes of advert, split between four four-minute breaks which are infuriating (especially since if you are watching Sky you are already paying substantially more than what you guys in the USA pay for HBO and also have to put up with shitty adverts on top of that). HBO shows, as we know, have irregular lengths, usually coming in between 50 and 60 minutes in length (in the case of The Wire, coming in between 45 and 65 minutes with the 90-minute series finale). So it'll be interesting to see if Sky keep the 60 minute slot and just lose the adverts (which would be fricking awesome, although highly unlikely), switch to longer 70+ minute slots or - most horrifically - edit the episodes down to 44 minutes so they can include the advert breaks. We'll have to keep an eye on how they handle Boardwalk Empire to see what they do to Thrones.

I don't think this was ever going to be a big hit in the UK to be honest. It's just too niche. Medieval politics, ok, fantasy medieval politics, errrm, fantasy medieval politics with a small amount of magic, whaaaaaa.

Difficult to say. Merlin is a huge, smash hit but that might be due more to it appealing to the family audience of Doctor Who. Obviously GoT would lose the kids' audience from that. OTOH, genre shows do do very well in the UK if marketed properly (Life on Mars and Ashes to Ashes were huge, mainstream hits). If GoT were marketed to the Tudors fanbase (The Tudors does very good business on the BBC) it could have done very well indeed.

Personally, I think the best-case result would have been GoT airing on Channel 4 (the channel that does best in turning HBO shows into huge, mainstream hits), but that was never on the cards.

Hope I get proved wrong of course. Contrary to the impression given in this thread, it isn't 1995 and a lot of people have Sky, or, you know, an internet connection.

9 million people have Sky and Sky One very, very rarely gets more than 1 million viewers for its US imported drama. BSG got about 300,000 viewers on Sky One despite lots of critical acclaim and being trailed heavily. Go figure.

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Such small numbers. Adult Swim gets more viewers than that at like 3 am.

Indeed. Amongst a lot of my friends, a lot of them have Sky for its many sports, music and movie channels. If they watch Sky One, it's for a specific programme or for The Simpsons.

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What will be very interesting to see about Sky is how they handle the HBO shows' greater lengths. Sky mostly show US imports which are the traditional 44 minutes in length with 16 minutes of advert, split between four four-minute breaks which are infuriating (especially since if you are watching Sky you are already paying substantially more than what you guys in the USA pay for HBO and also have to put up with shitty adverts on top of that). HBO shows, as we know, have irregular lengths, usually coming in between 50 and 60 minutes in length (in the case of The Wire, coming in between 45 and 65 minutes with the 90-minute series finale). So it'll be interesting to see if Sky keep the 60 minute slot and just lose the adverts (which would be fricking awesome, although highly unlikely), switch to longer 70+ minute slots or - most horrifically - edit the episodes down to 44 minutes so they can include the advert breaks. We'll have to keep an eye on how they handle Boardwalk Empire to see what they do to Thrones.

It won't be the first HBO show they've aired, although they might not have aired many before - I remember that they showed Deadwood, although I don't know if that had any irregular length episodes. I think we can safely assume that whatever they do with it, they won't cut back on the adverts.

Seriously? The Sopranos? Deadwood etc? They were massive hits down here, so I guess we have no issues with American TV.

It's not exactly an issue with American TV, it's more an issue with what channel they end up on, some American shows which are shown on one of the main UK channels like 24 or The X-Files or Heroes get very good ratings (for a while, anyway). I seem to remember that Farscape got about 2-3 million viewers in the UK whereas similar shows that generally seem to be higher profile among SF fans like Battlestar Galactica or Firefly only got a small fraction of that audience, the difference being that Farscape had a half-decent timeslot on BBC2 whereas the other two were only shown on satellite channels.

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Ok, so that was just a taste. But the appetite is whet.

Was the gorgeous lil platinum blonde girl Sansa ? If so, they got her right. U can easily see why LittleFinger and Sandor, amongst others become so enamored. The guy with the muscles, had to be the Gregor, cause there was no disfigurement. Thats pretty much all I could glean from that glimpse. And no, I'm not going to the GOT forum and read all the spoilers etc. Don't want that level of detail, correct or incorrect. That lil trailer/preview, with GRRM talking about how good he thinks it is will do for me. Until it airs.

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The "in production" snippet they showed.

As I said in the True Blood thread, I actually wasn't that impressed with the trailer proper, but I loved the rest of what they showed. Everything is so lush and detailed, even the bits I might personally have done differently. ;)

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