Have you? The Silmarillon and various appendices? If you have, then you must see common ground. Saying GoT has nothing in common with Tolkien is like saying day has nothing to do with the Sun. Heck, claiming something sweepingly called "Game of Thrones," (although officially, "A Song of Fire and Ice") has nothing to…

I think, to me, True Detective got better after the 5th episode because it was confirmed at that point that the camera was an objective observer and the two leads were honest narrators. That was a huge change from the ambiguity surrounding eps 1-5. That made all the dangling clues that were not explained or picked…

Best show ever is not really my view, just better than GoT, which, unlike you, is not allergic to hyperbolic reaction - in my opinion anyway.

Using "literal" with True Detective doesn't make much sense. to me. Maybe I read to much into it; then again, maybe a lot of people are a little defensive over GoT.

"Tolkien" encompasses more than just the four main books. Fantasy authors have gotten away with re-writing various appendices from the Middle Earth mythos for decades.

Sure, you can try to connect the Bierce, HPL, and Chambers dots; or the noir themes. But there nothing so straight forward as yet another Tolkien derivative in the "High Fantasy" genre.

Like we all waste a lot of time doing our job.

Game of Thrones is the occasional seven minutes of sensational television surrounded by the regularly scheduled boring melodrama filler to stretch each season to a point of transparent thinness. Suspense is so lacking in some episodes or filler arcs that it is in turns, IMO, one of the best and one of the most…