It has the look and feel of game of thrones, throwing all the names, sets, violence and sex at you that you know and love from the original. But without providing any substance, intriguing or complex characters. It's a pale imitation of (and shamelessly making every attempt to imitate) the original and the best storyline it can muster is some one dimensional squabbling over succession. Everyone wants the iron throne, nobody makes much of a secret of it. The current king is about as charismatic and interesting as the ulcer on his back we have to keep seeing. There's only so many cheap shocks you can throw at audiences and they've used them all by episode 3

Don't get me wrong there's enough game of thronesy action to keep you watching, with plenty of entertaining scenes such as the joust. But quality tv this is not.