Skip to main content

TCA Diary: Game of Thrones to Launch Spring 2011 on HBO

HBO teased a fifteen-second clip of its upcoming George R.R. Martin series Game of Thrones to critics on the final day of the Television Critics Association Summer Press Tour.

At the executive session earlier this afternoon, the pay cabler declined to name an exact launch date for Game of Thrones but indicated that it would premiere in Spring 2011, possibly as early as March.

"It's about a quest for power and a quest for the kingdom," said Michael Lombardo, HBO president of programming, about the series, which is based on Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series.

"It was an easy answer," said Richard Plepler about picking up the project to series, considering it's a genre that HBO isn't typically known for and which isn't usually a favorite of Plepler or Lombardo. "It wasn't the genre that we responded to, it was the storytelling," he continued.

In other HBO-related news:
  • True Blood: Alan Ball's involvement in upcoming drama pilot All Signs of Death will not affect his role running True Blood. (Not that I ever thought it would.)
  • Eastbound and Down: Season Two of Eastbound and Down seems like it's heading to Mexico...
  • No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency: "We are talking to our friends at the Weinstein Company to do two movies." Project won't come back as a series but may be resurrected as a series of TV movies, if deals can be made and scheduling go through. [Editor: fingers crossed.]
  • Mildred Pierce: The five-hour Mildred Pierce miniseries, which stars Kate Winslet, Evan Rachel Wood, and Guy Pearce, is based on the book rather than the film itself. There are narrative and stylistic differences.
  • Curb Your Enthusiasm: "Whatever Larry David is happy to keep doing, we're happy to keep doing with Larry David," said Plepler. They're taking Curb season by season. But the upcoming season--filming in New York and airing in 2011--needn't be the final run.
  • Entourage: Entourage will end after next season, which will likely be six episodes long. It may then segue into a film.

Stay tuned.
Labels:

Comments

David said…
I would have loved to see just a few seconds of Game of Thrones, Camelot, Episodes, Shameless, The Borgias & the Spartacus prequel.
8/07/2010
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Have a Burning Question for Team Darlton, Matthew Fox, Evangeline Lilly, or Michael Emerson?

Lost fans: you don't have to make your way to the island via Ajira Airways in order to ask a question of the creative team or the series' stars. Televisionary is taking questions from fans to put to Lost 's executive producers/showrunners Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse and stars Matthew Fox ("Jack Shephard"), Evangeline Lilly ("Kate Austen"), and Michael Emerson ("Benjamin Linus") for a series of on-camera interviews taking place this weekend. If you have a specific question for any of the above producers or actors from Lost , please leave it in the comments section below . I'll be accepting questions until midnight PT tonight and, while I can't promise I'll be able to ask any specific inquiry due to the brevity of these on-camera interviews, I am looking for some insightful and thought-provoking questions to add to the mix. So who knows: your burning question might get asked after all.
253 comments
Continue reading full story...

What's Done is Done: The Eternal Struggle Between Good and Evil on the Season Finale of "Lost"

Every story begins with thread. It's up to the storyteller to determine just how much they need to parcel out, what pattern they're making, and when to cut it short and tie it off. With last night's penultimate season finale of Lost ("The Incident, Parts One and Two"), written by Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse, we began to see the pattern that Lindelof and Cuse have been designing towards the last five seasons of this serpentine series. And it was only fitting that the two-hour finale, which pushes us on the road to the final season of Lost , should begin with thread, a loom, and a tapestry. Would Jack follow through on his plan to detonate the island and therefore reset their lives aboard Oceanic Flight 815 ? Why did Locke want to kill Jacob? What caused The Incident? What was in the box and just what lies in the shadow of the statue? We got the answers to these in a two-hour season finale that didn't quite pack the same emotional wallop of previous season ...
135 comments
Continue reading full story...

Comics "Authority" Warren Ellis to Pen Original Series for AMC Network

I was initially surprised when AMC announced late last year that they intended to enter into the original programming route, particularly scripted series. But my jaw dropped last night when I learned who was developing a show with the network: British writer Warren Ellis, better known to many as a god among comic writers. (Full disclosure: Yes, I am a comic geek.) For those of you not familiar with Warren Ellis or his outstanding body of work, he's an extremely prolific comics writer whose work touches upon sociopolitical commentary. Some of his best known works include "Planetary" (penciled by Joss Whedon 's "Astonishing X-Men" collaborator John Cassaday), "The Authority," "Global Frequency" (which had been developed by John Rogers of Kung Fu Monkey fame as a pilot for the WB two seasons ago), "Excalibur" (starring my favorite X-Man--along with Joss Whedon's--Kitty Pryde), and "Transmetropolitan." And if you, my...
2 comments
Continue reading full story...