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It started with an innocent question.

A couple of weeks ago, my wife asked her Facebook friends about "Game of Thrones." We had never watched the show, because we were not HBO subscribers. (I work in journalism — we're poor, or hadn't you heard?) But we had just signed up for HBO, and the sixth season of "Game of Thrones" was about to start.

"If we watch the new ep this weekend, will we have any idea what's going on?" my wife asked. "Is it better to cram a couple of old eps in first? And if so, which ones?"

The subsequent wailing was so loud, you would have thought a dragon had just strafed a village.

Everyone — my brothers, her sister, an assortment of friends — all gave the same answer: Watch every one of the 50 previous episodes, in order, no skipping.

One of my brothers grudgingly acknowledged that time is finite and said we could watch two episodes per season to get the gist — but even he said it would be better if we watched the whole thing, start to finish.

A similar conversation erupted in The Tribune newsroom. Several of my co-workers — including our esteemed TV critic, Scott D. Pierce — said we would be floundering in a sea of characters we wouldn't recognize or identify, and be hopelessly lost trying to understand who's doing what to whom.

My wife and I carefully discussed all this and came to a decision: Screw it, let's watch it anyway.

We already knew who Jon Snow was — he was the dead guy. We also knew everyone believed this to be a temporary condition, no matter how hard the cast and crew tried to convince interviewers otherwise.

We knew Cersei Lannister was screwing her twin brother, Jamie. We also knew Cersei had to perform the Walk of Shame through the streets last season. We knew Peter Dinklage was clever and had all the good one-liners. And we knew there were dragons.

We figured this basic information and the "previously on …" montage at the beginning of the episode were enough to get by. We could muddle through, even if we didn't know Hodor from a hole in the ground.

And it happened: We were entertained for an hour — which really is all one can ask of a TV show.

When I mentioned this to my co-workers the following Monday morning, the response was disbelief. The prevailing attitude could be summed up by Pierce's declaration: "You're idiots!"

It's not as if we expected to watch a single episode of "Game of Thrones" and become instant experts on the show. We're not likely to blaze through all the rounds of a "Game of Thrones"-themed night of Geeks Who Drink any time soon. We just wanted to see what all the fuss was about.

One reason we were able to follow along is that "Game of Thrones," for all the hype about it being the greatest thing ever on television, is still a TV drama. A TV drama — whether it's as lowbrow as "Dynasty" or as refined as "Downton Abbey" — has conventions, patterns and rules.

TV characters are going to behave in particular ways, and viewers with any history watching TV can see the signs of those behaviors. Once you interpret the signs, you can gather a rough understanding of what will happen next and why. (For example, because they made a great show of not moving his body for two episodes, it was easy to deduce that Jon Snow somehow was going to come back to life.)

Besides, "Game of Thrones" has carved out a sizable niche in popular culture. One doesn't have to watch the show to pick up on that. It's all around — in magazine articles, web postings, podcasts, TV reports, marketing campaigns and water-cooler talk. It's inescapable.

Pierce makes the argument that "Game of Thrones" — because it's based on George R.R. Martin's "A Song of Ice and Fire" book series — is a saga with a beginning, a middle and an end, and my wife and I are coming in at the end. I concede that it's not unlike jumping into "The Lord of the Rings" with "The Return of the King," without watching "The Fellowship of the Ring" and "The Two Towers" first. (In both cases, we might say, "I thought Sean Bean was in this.")

But the heated reaction, and the initial insistence that we start from square one, speaks to a peculiarity among fandoms: a haughtiness from those who were fans at the beginning, aimed at us latecomers. To those fans, we are unworthy because we haven't put in the time, haven't done the work, haven't paid our dues.

Perhaps I don't feel that way because two of my fandom tribes — "Star Trek" and "Doctor Who" — are each a half-century old and too vast to watch from the beginning. If you try something and like it, who am I to say you're not doing it right?

After watching that episode of "Game of Thrones," we watched the second one of this new season. Before that, we went back and watched the show's very first episode. (Maisie Williams was tiny at age 12, wasn't she?)

Watching our first episode had its desired effect: We liked it, and we want more. So we have a new question to our "Game of Thrones"-obsessed friends: Can we be in your club now?

Sean P. Means writes The Cricket in daily blog form at http://www.sltrib.com/blogs/moviecricket. Follow him on Twitter @moviecricket. Email him at spmeans@sltrib.com.