Game of Thrones, season 1

Ned Stark runs the North on the principle that the man who passes the sentence swings the sword. His friend King Robert arrives with an offer that is really a summons: come south, be the Hand, help me govern a realm I have been drinking my way through. Ned goes because the last Hand died strangely, and finds the answer in plain sight - the queen's children are not the king's.

The knowledge is fatal in stages: a boar for Robert, a cell for Ned, and then - past every deal that had been arranged, on the whim of the boy king Joffrey - a sword in front of a crowd, with both his daughters watching. The shock is structural: the show's moral centre does not survive its first season, and every safety assumption goes with him.

The North rises under Robb. Tyrion Lannister, the queen's dwarf brother, talks his way out of a sky cell and into his father's war camp. On the Wall, Jon Snow learns that the Night's Watch guards against something older than wildlings, and that the dead do not always stay down.

Across the sea, Daenerys Targaryen is sold to a horselord by her brother and ends the year owning the story: a widow walking into a funeral pyre with three fossil eggs, and walking out with three living dragons.