It was definitely a weird way to start - take more or less the nicest, most normal, moral-center-of-the-show character that people really like… and spend ten minutes portraying him as a desperate creepy degraded unstrung broken man-whore. Really off-putting.

Funny's fairly subjective, I suppose. Myself, I've been frequently reduced to helpless choking / near-screaming laughter by many of the episodes. Particularly the GOB & Tony Wonder one. Nearly died.

Totally. Except if GRR Martin had been at all involved half the cast would've been slaughtered by midseason. Which would've been sad.

What's also *really* interesting, from a technical perspective, is that because this is on Netflix and *only* on Netflix… all the episode files are just sitting on Netflix's servers. So, y'know… they could continue to tweak the episodes. If they wanted. Like they could go back and improve some of the amazingly cheesy…

Watched the first 11 minutes on Sunday and hated it. Turned it off and swore to never watch any further lest my memories of the original three seasons be irrevocably tainted. Then caved a few hours later and tried again and… really got into it. Mentally adjusted to the new tone and structure and blitzed 11 episodes.…

So it's basically a remake of "Nation's Pride" with Cooper playing the Frederick Zoller role?