I waited for the second episode before writing this because I wanted to give the show another chance. I don't really want to dump on HBO. I know they are hoping to revive the magnificent spectacle that was Game Of Thrones; the international, multi-generational audience, the global watch parties etc.... I wish them the best and hope this show pays off. But I don't think I'll be carrying on. Not because it's bad. I don't really think it's "bad". It's just, as I had feared, a lackluster knock-off. It's what the Hobbit films were to the Lord Of The Rings; an obvious attempt to cash in on a better product by trying (and failing) to do more of the same. I find it a little ironic that people who trashed the last season of GoT could love HotD. I too was disappointed in the last season of GoT, but not for the reasons I heard from many other fans. And this series already has all the elements I disliked about the final season. The things that hooked me on GoT were the pacing of the scenes, the realism in location and nuance, the way they introduced and developed characters, the natural banter etc... all of those were abandoned in the final season of GoT, and none of these things are evident from the beginning in this show. The Double D's were offered plenty of money to deliver the full ten episodes for the final season. But for some reason they opted to give us a truncated season, abandoning their long established scene and character development, opting instead for quick expositional scenes and battles filled with hackneyed deus-ex-machina moments. But it took the Double D's years to take so many short cuts. From the start of HotD, the pacing is quick. Scenes are not given time to breath and therefor characters have no time to develop beyond their specific role in the story. Remember when we first met Ned Stark and his family... and Robert Barathoen? Remember when we were first introduced to Danyeras and Littlefinger, and Cercai and Jamie and TYRION! We met all those characters in the very first episode. And how quickly, for good and bad, they won us over. But I have not yet seen one character in HotD whose story I really care to follow. And the dialogue isn't much more than huge info-dumps delivered by GoT style caricatures. Everything has a glossy CG sheen, the modern equivalent of putting Vaseline on the lens. And nothing has any weight. The jousting scene tried to replicate the realism of The Mountain's battle with gore.... tried and failed, imo. GoT felt real. Authentic. This just felt gratuitous. But the real test for me is simple: do I want to watch more? And the sad answer is, not really. I'm not a hater. I don't think it's bad. It's just meh... and it's competing for my attention with a lot of other new shows... and sadly not cutting it. I really wanted to like it. I did.

(EDIT: I realized I was wrong about meeting all the afore mentioned GoT characters in the first epiosde. I think we don't meet Little Finger until episode 2... or 3 maybe? It's been a while. But the rest still stands.)