Game of Thrones is a freaking chore of a series to read. It's cool if you like that kind of thing but you practically have to keep a dossier (plus genealogical tree) handy at all times for when actual important characters show up amidst the hundreds of unimportant-but-still-every-detail-of-their-lineage-and-clothes-and-banner-is-described-at-length characters. The TV series is 1000X easier to follow, character-wise, because if some random one-time guy shows up on screen to hand somebody a letter or something, he is a random one time guy and yet in the book he would have at least two paragraphs describing his family and history and where the furniture in his home comes from. And then you never see him again. Or he dies two pages later. And his name would probably have at least three Y's in it.

Unfortunately having the books as a background makes the TV series a lot more subtly complex, because you are then adding nuances from your own recollection of the series. I can't honestly say how it comes across without that, by which I mean the quality of story telling. It's probably still fairly good although it's still in the millions-of-characters-introductions part, so harder to judge so far. The casting is great though.