6 brutally negative reviews critics gave 'Game of Thrones' when it first came out

"The blood flows freely while the storytelling tends to congeal ... Any sense of urgency is missing in action ... Through the first six hours, it can still be a chore to simply keep all of the characters straight. Let alone what kingdoms they inhabit and how many out-of-wedlock children they might have."

-Uncle Barky

"All of which is to say that even for the most open minds, 'Game of Thrones' can be a big stein of groggy slog ... [It's] deadly serious about its thees and thous — a fantasy trope that pop culture has been mocking since Dungeons & Dragons emerged from the basement rec-room to invent Google. "

-The Washington Post

"[It's] quasi-medieval, dragon-ridden fantasy crap ... There are unscalable slabs of expositionistic dialogue clogging the forward movement of the story. Sonorous and/or schmaltzy talk substitutes for the revelation of character through action. There is the sense of intricacy having been confused with intrigue and of a story transferred all too faithfully from its source and thus not transformed to meet the demands of the screen."

-Slate

"'Game of Thrones,' one of the supposed biggies this spring, is a big letdown. Why is it so convoluted and punishing? It is to television what the Spider-Man musical is to Broadway."

-Orlando Sentinel

"'Game of Thrones' is boy fiction patronizingly turned out to reach the population’s other half ... [It] serves up a lot of confusion in the name of no larger or really relevant idea beyond sketchily fleshed-out notions that war is ugly, families are insidious and power is hot. If you are not averse to the Dungeons & Dragons aesthetic, the series might be worth the effort. If you are nearly anyone else, you will hunger for HBO to get back to the business of languages for which we already have a dictionary."

-The New York Times