George R.R. Martin’s best-selling book series “A Song of Ice and Fire” is brought to the screen as HBO sinks its considerable storytelling teeth into the medieval fantasy epic. Most of these characters are just names and faces that serve as decoys so fans will have a harder time predicting deaths. The side effect of this is that a lot of screen time is devoted to background characters—screen time that could have served to make the story’s actual characters more interesting.