Nominations for the 2013 Critics’ Choice Television Awards have been announced, and along with plenty of welcome surprises there are a couple of snubs that are likely to have people talking.  Here’s a brief rundown of some of the highlights:

• Best Drama Series nominees include Game of Thrones, Homeland, Breaking Bad, and FX’s excellent new series The Americans.  Conspicuously absent is Mad Men, which only scored one nomination overall for Elisabeth Moss as Lead Actress.
• Best Comedy Series nominees include Louie, New Girl, Parks and Recreation, and Veep, with Emmy favorite Modern Family failing to land a nomination along with last year’s winner Community.  Instead, ABC sitcom The Middle made the cut.
• Netflix’s House of Cards scored two nominations for Best Actor (Kevin Spacey) and a very deserved Best Supporting Actor nod for Corey Stoll.
• David Lynch landed a Best Guest Performer in a Comedy Series nom for his excellent work in Louie, and Happy Endings alums Casey Wilson and Adam Pally were recognized in the supporting categories.
• The love it/loathe it HBO comedy Girls didn’t get a Best Comedy Series nod, but received acting nominations for Lena Dunham, Alex Karpovsky, and Patrick Wilson.
• FX’s American Horror Story and CBS’ The Big Bang Theory scored the most nominations with six each, topping all other programs.

Hit the jump to check out the full list of nominees, and sound off in the comments with your thoughts on the lineup.  The awards will be handed out on June 10th.

Game of Thrones is juggling a lot of stories, as it always has, but this year it feels different because for the first time I think that viewers are really clearly feeling the stakes.  We know the major characters, we know the major trajectory.  There are zombies to the north and dragons to the east, and a lot of political intrigue in between.  What’s been nice about this season too is that we’ve gotten lots of great character moments, even in the midst of so many stories.  The storytelling has often been fractured though, but what “Second Sons” did a great job with was actually giving us time to pause and really embrace the plots and characters this week — no Jon, no Robb, no Bran, no Jaime and Brienne and no Theon meant lots of time to spend with the others, especially because so many of them for once shared the same screen.  Hit the jump for more on why your brother is now your father-in-law (it is known).

I know that I’ve been promising action every week on Game of Thrones for the last few (like Winter, it is coming!), and while “The Bear and the Maiden Fair” delivered some towards the end, the rest of the episode was fraught with rich character building and small payoffs that are certainly propelling us into some interesting situations for the final three episodes (I swear!).  “The Bear and the Maiden Fair” had a lot to do with hard truths, and studied the pairing off of characters for good or ill.  Hit the jump for why “if you waste your time getting people to love you, you’ll be the best liked dead man in town.”

More setup and machinations this week on Game of Thrones, with a few really great little scenes slipped in between the big reveals that should start paying dividends immediately.  Of course, I said that last week, and this week we again got a lot of walking and talking, with people being built up just to be torn down.  We left Dany and Stannis out of things, and shoehorned Theon painfully in (literally), but other than that there were updates from all across the realm, which Littlefinger tells us is little more than a figment of our imaginations.  Varys asks what we are left with if not this shared delusion: chaos?  It’s a pit.  “It’s not a pit,” Littlefinger counters, “it’s a ladder.”  Hit the jump to find out why you should have learned from your position to not overplay your… position.

Because both HBO and AMC are stingy with screeners, this episode of Game of Thrones has been filtered in my mind through Mad Men.  I’m pretty sure Sally is destined for the Iron Throne.  Back in actual Westeros though, we ignored Bran and three-eyed crows again and bounced all over the realm and beyond with almost everyone else, in an episode that was mostly about setup and a little bit about friendship.  Also a wee bit about pickled babies, but that’s another matter.  Everyone is growing restless in the calm after Stannis’ failed attempt on the capitol late last season, and are back to scheming about relationships and marrying people off, with mixed results.  You know what never gives mixed results?  Figs.  Hit the jump for more.

After an episode of Game of Thrones last week that was so visually exceptional, this week went on to match it in terms of action, although with lots and lots of talking (not necessarily a bad thing, though).  The bar has been set really high this season, and so far I think the show has risen to the occasion, being a lot clearer than last season’s sometimes chaotic storytelling.  It’s helped too that we didn’t see everyone in every episode — this week left out Robb, Jon, Stannis  and Davos, four very important characters — because with eleven other stories to tell in an hour, there was simply no room.  What I really liked about “And Now His Watch Has Ended” though was reflected in the title — this episode was all about the ladies (nearly), and it was very well wrought.  Hit the jump for why it burns, burns, burns, the Ring of Fire, the Ring of Fire.

Though Monday evening’s TV ratings are heavily skewed downward due to preemptive coverage of the tragedy in Boston, Sunday evening’s cable ratings have arrived.  Here’s a look at how things stacked up:

• The fantastic third episode of HBO’s Game of Thrones netted an all-time high audience of 4.7 million viewers, which is up from the season premiere’s 4.4 million total.  A fourth season of the fantasy series has already been ordered, and it’s safe to say Game of Thrones won’t be going away for a very, very long time.
• The season two premiere of the swell HBO comedy series Veep scored 1.2 million viewers in the post-Game of Thrones slot.  That’s up 11% from the season one finale and marks the second most-watched episode in the show’s history.
• Finally, Sunday’s Jon Hamm-directed episode of Mad Men dipped from last week’s two-hour season six opener with 2.7 million viewers.  That’s down quite a bit from the premiere’s 3.4 million total.

This week on The Collision, we are joined by Allison Keene and Charles Judson.  Our conversation is sparked by a Mad Men spec script from actress Erika Anderson, which brings African-American characters into Matthew Weiner‘s critically acclaimed show.  From there, our conversation expands to explore diversity in popular TV series, if showrunners should feel obligated to diversify their casts, the difficulty in writing minority characters, and much more.  As always, we finish up with our recommendations.

Click here to listen to the new episode of The Collision, click here for the previous episode (“Violence and Evil Dead“), click here to add the podcast to your RSS, and click here to find us on iTunes. To keep up to date with The Collision, you can follow us on Twitter at @MattGoldberg, @AdamChitwood, and @DrClawMD (Dave Trumbore). Hit the jump to check out the trailers for this week’s recommendations.

By the light of R’hllor, what a fantastic hour of television — this is Game of Thrones at its best.  So many scenes this week were quietly indicative of character.  We didn’t need to rely on sexposition or chatter to get at the heart of things: a simple dragging of a chair spoke volumes.  Even though the show jumped around again this week and visited almost everyone (giving some, like Jon and Stannis, only a few moments of time), it still felt laid-back, accessible, and not frantic in its pacing.  Time spent at Riverrun and King’s Landing and even in the woods with Brienne and Jaime was slow and thoughtful, and did a lot in the way of character building.  Hit the jump for why horse-part crop circles are all the rage north of the Wall.

After an exciting premiere, Game of Thrones slowed down a little this week and relied on a lot of exposition (but no trademark sexposition!)  Things jumped around quite a bit, checking in on everyone except for Dany and Stannis, which was fairly mind-boggling.  Adding to that, we met quite a few new people.  It’s at times like these I wonder about you non-book readers.  I’m excited to see the faces of familiar characters, whereas I can only imagine most people watching are thinking, “who’s this new, unwashed bearded guy?  I was just starting to get the other 39 unwashed, bearded guys straight!”  Actually occasionally I feel that way, too.  Anyway, this week we swirled all around the Seven Kingdoms and came out knowing a lot more than we did, without really knowing too much.  Hit the jump, I have lemon cakes!

As if you didn’t see this one coming: HBO has renewed the immensely popular fantasy series Game of Thrones for a fourth season.  The pickup comes just a couple of days after the show’s season three premiere, which pulled in a record-breaking 4.4 million viewers.  The renewal was essentially a foregone conclusion, as Game of Thrones has been a massively profitable series for HBO.  Not only does the show pull in great ratings, but its DVDs and Blu-rays—an incredibly lucrative market for the pay cable network—are record sellers.  Hit the jump for more.

The Walking Dead and Game of Thrones are proving that watching TV live is still something viewers want to do.  Though DV-Rs, OnDemand and online viewing have seemingly reduced traditional ratings by allowing access long after the live event, there’s still something to be said for tuning in to the zeitgeist and wanting to experience what everyone else is.  It was a big night for TV, with two of the most popular shows had important episodes: AMC’s The Walking Dead wrapped up its third season while HBO’s Game of Thrones had a much anticipated premiere.  It looks like more people chose zombies over Westeros this week, but hit the jump for the numbers breakdown and what it all means.

Game of Thrones returns — welcome back to Westeros, ladies and hedge knights, wenches and thieves.  You are forgiven for thinking in the episode’s first few minutes that you still had the dial on AMC and had stumbled onto The Walking Dead, but things picked right back up north of the wall where the show left them, with Sam lost in the whiteness and coming across something, well, undead.  In case you had forgotten, Winter is Coming.  In fact, it seems to be here.  And for most of the rest of the hour we checked back in on all of those poor Southren folk who know not what wickedness their way comes.  Hit the jump for more on who we saw (and who we didn’t) in this episode that moved from ice to fire.

HBO’s epic masterpiece Game of Thrones is back for Season 3, with bigger battles, devastating betrayals and more deaths, as everyone fights for control of the Iron Throne.  Now that magic is growing stronger and the dragons have been let loose, there’s no telling who might be in jeopardy or in power next.

At the show’s press day, co-stars Michelle Fairley (“Catelyn Stark”), Maisie Williams (“Arya Stark”) and Isaac Hempstead Wright (“Bran Stark”) talked about bonding during the first season, how hard it is for Catelyn to be separated from her family, how the Reeds will add to the dynamic of the group, how much they know of their characters from the books, what it’s like to see the fans react to all of the show’s surprises, how different it is to do the show now, experiencing the fandom in America, who they’d like to have scenes with, and whether or not they’ve ever tried sitting on the Iron Throne.  Check out what they had to say after the jump, and be aware that there are some spoilers.  

At last year’s San Diego Comic-Con, it’d only been weeks since the Mondo crew (who you really oughtta be following by now on Twitter via @MondoNews) announced their acquisition of the Lord of the Rings license.  Fantasy fans were pretty thrilled about that headed into the Con (several people told me Tyler Stout was “definitely” going to show up to the Con and drop a new poster set for Peter Jackson’s franchise), but they had a different, equally exciting surprise waiting for them that week:  the start of a Game of Thrones series.  We’ve seen a ton of Game of Thrones-themed prints since then, but the two dropping tomorrow—from artists Aaron Horkey and Richey Beckett—are two of the best in the whole run.  See ‘em after the jump, folks.