Game of Thrones Renewed for Season 3

With season 2 hardly under way, Game of Thrones has already been renewed for a third season--another example of the HBO buzz-accelerating hit series publicity gambit best known from early seasons of True Blood.

The April 1 season 2 premiere drew a healthy 8.3 million viewers in aggregate. Its first three episodes have drawn a steady 3.8 million just for the first broadcasts--well over the season 1 average of 2.5 million, and even the peak of 3.0 million for the season 1 finale.

Said HBO programming president Michael Lombardo: "Series creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss raised our expectations for the second season--and then surpassed them. We ... can't wait to see what Dan and David have in store for the next season."

The third season will be ten episodes long and will more or less adapt the first half of A Storm of Swords, the third book in the Song of Ice and Fire series. Novelist George R. R. Martin will again contribute to the series, writing the seventh episode, which has the working title of "Autumn Storms."

Meanwhile Emmy-winning co-star Peter Dinklage has noted that all this success--glowing reviews, exploding ratings, the cachet of being one of the premiere shows at a premiere TV network, even an enlarged budget (up 15% over season 1)--is a double-edged sword.

"There's so much pressure to, in terms of this genre, make it bigger," Dinklage told the LA Times. "There's all this talk about, 'We want more battles!' and there's so many fan sites. And the show is based on a very successful series of novels [by George R.R. Martin] and so there was so much anticipation for it--and so much pressure put on it. You can't really listen to all of that if you're going to be successful. It's just too much to take in, too much to take on. You have to block all of that out and tell the really smart story that was told by George and not try to take on too much that takes the [priorities] in other directions."

Dinklage mused on the growing budget meeting larger expectations: "I think more money can be very detrimental to movies and TV because things get solved economically rather than creatively and that's never a good solution," he said. "I think with a lot of filmmakers, their first film is their best film because they had to think on their feet and solve problems with ingenuity. The more money there is, too, the more cooks you have in the kitchen and suddenly you have 20 producers showing up on the set and you don't know who they are or what they even do."

So far, though, Game of Thrones shows every sign of a well organized campaign, and we're all looking eagerly ahead to the continued brilliance of the adaptation.

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