(I'm sorry if there's another thread on the topic. I tries a search, but there are a lot of posts about A Game of Thrones.)

I haven't really been paying attention to what's been going on with the series since I stopped watching it, but recently friends who've never had any interest in fantasy have been talking about it nonstop, to my amusement and satisfaction. And suddenly I can't even read the latest news about the StarCraft Proleague finals without being bombarded with references to A Game of Thrones. And while that's fantastic, I understand that to mean that it's been successful, or at least popular. So I'm a bit fishing for reasons, since I don't get it myself.

When I say I didn't like it, it's not that there was anything in particular I hated about it, it just felt like a faithful adaptation of the book, but it didn't bring anything interesting to compensate for what is lost in the change in medium. Obviously one can't expect as much story depth in the series as there was in the books, that would just be a silly expectation. But one would expect the possibilities of visual and audio stimulation to make up for it. If you take The Lord of the Rings, for example, while I will rant endlessly about the movies compared to the books, I still loved and own them all. They're beautiful. The music is excellent. And Saruman always sounds like an absolute baller.

Obviously given the style of A Song of Ice and Fire I expected this series to have a pronounced brown and grey theme, but my disappointment went beyond that. It started with replacing the Others in the opening with those black-handed zombies (I forget what they're called). As I recall from A Game of Thrones there's really only two real fantastical scenes in the book. This one with the Others and the Dragons at the end. And I was really excited to see how they would look too, given their description in the books. The Others got me hooked up from the start. So that was underwhelming.

Then comes, I think, the execution scene, the purpose of which I couldn't discern at all. In the series I mean. It just felt like it was there because it was in the books. I didn't catch any kind of narrative or emotional importance to it.

Then we get to the direwolves and that scene felt drained of energy too. Couldn't feel the excitement of the boys or the fear and disgust of the adults.

I make it sound worse than it was, but the point is that at this point I stopped watching because I simply couldn't see what I could get from watching the series that I couldn't get better from rereading the books.

I don't know, maybe it's because most people didn't know the story? It's A Song of Ice and Fire's plot, so obviously it would be interesting for people who didn't already know it, which is kind of why I'm asking here, for the opinions of people who had read the books before watching.