There’s an excellent article in the Onion’s A.V. Club, written by Noel Murray, which sets the ground for a discussion of the television series Beauty and the Beast through the lens of a specific episode, “Ozymandias”... and through looking at that episode’s writer, none other than George R.R. Martin. It covers some very important views GRRM has on writing (“It’s all furniture”) that’s very much well worth looking at.
The show’s romantic side is something that I’d like to emphasize in particular—in all the popular media attention to the darkness, realism, and “grittiness” of the TV series, the fact is that at heart Martin identifies himself as something of a Romantic (as in art movement of the 18th and 19th centuries) in his approach to writing and how characters express themselves. To a certain degree, the sacrifice pared some of this way as a lot of the more explicitly Romanticist aspects of the narrative lie in the past of the setting, but bits and piece still shine through. There’s no great shock that the epiode reviewed is titled after Shelley’s famed poem.