Board Thread:TV Show Discussion/@comment-5014364-20150620174256/@comment-5014364-20150620183400

Farerb wrote: It wouldn't have work in TV medium and for general audience to ignore half the characters for a whole season, two seasons in a row.

Oh heck no. The hope was that they'd do what "The Two Towers" did: Tolkien's novel covers all of Aragorn, then backs up, and does all of Frodo's story occurring within the same timeframe of the first half. The movie just intercut it chronologically.

What we thought or hoped we'd get is a chronological intercutting of the storylines...which is the novel Martin originally wanted to write, before it turned into the size of two novels.

Martin solved "The Meereenese Knot" that way - the stories had grown too long and the climax of Cersei or Daenerys's arcs could not fit in one physical novel - so he published them separately.

Because the books come out years apart.

in contrast, a TV series with one season following the next each year? They could have done that. Moved some plotlines a bit ahead to make a climax, etc.

You can't have a Red Wedding scale event without long setup, every year.