A Game of Thrones

Okay, I had never heard of George R. R. Martin's A Game of Thrones until the HBO series was previewed.  I was interested because I love Boromir.  So I started watching the show.  It was exciting.  I liked the characters.  I didn't like the sex as it was explicit and really uncalled for.  The only time sex is needed, if at all, is to advance the story.  And even then it can just be alluded to not graphically shown.
Anyhoo, after watching the first few episodes I did what I normally do with book adapted TV shows:  I read the book.  I then realized that the show almost follows the book exactly.  To me that's boring.  There are some deviations which are good like when ::SPOILERS:: the TV show had Boromir fight Jamie rather than just getting crushed by his horse.  But really there wasn't much to look forward to in watching the show anymore.  Plus, Boromir dies, which was the main draw of the show for me ::END SPOILERS::.
Which brings me to one of the main reasons why I think  the whole series is just bad.  Main characters are crucial to advance a story.  But who is the main character in this series?  I don't know!  Everyone dies!  And if they haven't died yet, it's just because George hasn't written about them in the last thousand pages.  Plus there are more characters in this series than I can even count.  When George switches between character perspective I'm always confused as to who that person even is and what relation he or she has to anything that's going on elsewhere in the book.
Which brings me to point number two:  the whole series of Game of Thrones (previously called A Song of Ice and Fire) is about twelve million pages too long.  I don't even know what the story is about after five extra long books.  Every time the story seems to go somewhere, that character is killed off (bringing us back to point number one) and everything they did was essentially wiped off the record.
Really, there are many, many problems with this series, but I keep going back to it (usually out of boredom of life) so it has at least some draw.  Or I'm just OCD and can't not find out what happened.  Either way here's a sweet video from JoshSundquist that explains exactly my problem with A Game of Thrones.  Enjoy.