You know you're getting old when you start doing the math as to how many times you've shampooed your hair. If it's roughly once a day since the ago of 20 then let's see...I've shampooed my hair somewhere over 16,000 times. Sigh.
Well, my lovely wife and I have inadvertently got ourselves all wrapped up in HBO's Game of Thrones. Yeah, we've heard about it, even seen a few episodes at a friend's house here and there over the last few years. But totally wrapped up? No. We don't subscribe to HBO. $14.99 a month for a half dozen movie channels when there's so much great TV out there now almost for free? Not in our budget conscious world.
We were noodling around last month looking for a new series to binge on. We usually go for comedy or murder, and then my lovely wife mentioned (again) what ever happened to "The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency"? We saw the premier episode a few years back (probably when we had a free weekend of HBO) and then kind of forgot about it.
The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency is a charming detective series based in Africa and based upon a series of books written by Alexander McCall Smith. My lovely wife read the books somewhere along the line and wanted to see the series.
We discovered there were seven episodes and only one season, which is unfortunate because it was an enjoyable show. We discovered we could catch them all if we tried HBO for free for seven days. We figured, easy. And then we'd cancel right after. We'd done something like this with Showtime I believe and it went quite successfully. As I recall.
We jammed through the episodes within the allotted seven days, with days to spare. It was my job to cancel HBO, I had done the previous cancellation work with Showtime. I was a pro by this time. I even marked the cancel by date on the calendar.
When I went to my lovely wife's Amazon site, I had a heck of a time trying to find the place to cancel subscriptions. I was pretty darn sure I was there, only I probably wouldn't make a bet on it-especially now-and it totally and completely didn't look like there were any existing HBO subscriptions. At all.
Really.
So I figured, "Hey. Looks like HBO forgot all about us. They had a little slip in the gitch. Hahaha."
Ha. The next decision we had to make was what to do with a month of HBO.
We had heard rave reviews about GOT, and thought, "What the hell, let's give it a shot."
Annnnd away we went.
We started out fairly rapid fire, at a strong, consistent pace. I mean, each episode is at least an hour long, and there are ten episodes a season through Season 6. Then season 7 only has seven episodes, with the last one clocking in at an hour and a half.
We initially did forty 1-hour episodes in fourteen days. Which is a lot, I think, by anybody's standards. Especially us. We've never done anything like this. We're gonna get our $14.99 worth even if it turns us into video zombies!
We did slow a bit, but finished the last twenty-seven episodes in the following two weeks. It helped having two rainy day weekends in there during each assault.
Much to my chagrin, we had to re-up HBO for another month. We ended up half way through season seven when the bell rang. Almost, but not quite. They got us again. Which is fine. The final season started April 14th and we're all in until this thing is over.
We have discovered we have viewed this epic in probably the best way possible. I mean, everyone that's a fan of the show has had to wait EVERY year for months until the next season began. We blasted through 7 seasons in a little over a month and only had to wait about two weeks for the final season to begin.
It's a fabulous story about kings and queens, swords and hammers, honor and deceit. Lots of deceit. There's also three dragons, which is OK if you like dragons. There are no unicorns, which is fine, because unicorns aren't real and their existence would only take away from the story.
Season 1 starts a little slow, but as it all gets rolling a number of intertwining tales develop, all well acted and well paced.
There's a pretty fair amount of gore, and a couple of rather sadistic SOB's. Every appendage known to man, and I mean EVERY appendage, gets lopped off or avulsed somewhere along the line. Endless beheadings and lots of blood. I had to look away several times from the abhorrent gore, but I didn't look away when modest nudity was presented.
What can I say? I'd much rather gaze upon the eternal beauty of the feminine mystique than a headless neck spurting blood. And there's plenty of modest nudity for women as well, there's no naked discrimination. Lot's of butts for everyone!
There are heroes and there are villains. And treachery. Lots of treachery. And incest. Which was apparently semi in vogue back then. At least in make believe worlds.
A lot of characters you root for end up dying, shockingly so. And many of the villains do to. Believe me, you simply can't wait for one of the bad guys to get it, they are that bad. And when they finally do go, most in spectacular fashion, you can't help but to cheer.
We're not gonna go out and buy any GOT merchandise, like a play sword, coffee mug or underwear. But we are going to keep HBO for probably another month or two until we see this journey through.
On an extremely positive note, my lovely wife and I are heading to Florida in a few days to visit family and see the sun. And I will have exciting travel to blog about. Stay tuned!
