House Of The Dragon: Can the new show rekindle our love for Game of Thrones?
House of the Dragon arrives on Sky onMonday, August 22.
It can take years to get over a painful breakup. Eventually, though, the wounds heal and it is possible to fall in love again. Or so HBO and Sky Atlantic will hope ahead of the arrival on Monday of House of the Dragon – the lavish prequel series to Game Of Thrones.
Game of Thrones was the world’s favourite television show. Or at least it was until 2019 when it crashed and burned with a disastrous final season that proved somehow both underwhelming and over-cooked (and with a stray Starbucks cup notoriously making it into camera-shot). Just like that, the cult that had built around Thrones vanished in a finger-snap.
The gamble that House of the Dragon is making is that fans of its parent drama have had a change of heart and will want to return to Westeros.
But is there still an appetite for George RR Martin’s gory and lusty fantasy kingdom? At the recent ComicCon Dublin convention, every second attendee seemed to wear either a Stranger Things hoodie or to be dressed as a Marvel character. The Game of Thrones fanbase was conspicuously absent. There wasn’t even much of a queue to sit on a replica of the fabled Iron Throne at King’s Landing. The throne was all alone.
That Game of Thrones had become the incredible shrinking franchise was confirmed earlier this year by nerd-culture songwriter Gavin Dunne, who performs as Miracle Of Sound. He has paid tribute to video games such as Assassin's Creed and television such as Netflix’s Arcane and racked up tens of millions of YouTube views along the way. In the case of Thrones, he saw its popularity diminished almost overnight.
“With Game of Thrones, I did a few songs about that,” he said. “Which were doing really, really well. Until the final episode of the show. And then, as with everything to do with that show, those songs fell away very quickly.”
Nor can House of the Dragon rely on the shock value which made Game of Thrones so sensational in 2011. Eleven years ago, George RR Martin’s ruthless storytelling – in particular a willingness to bump off beloved characters – scrambled the circuitry of viewers across the world.
Television in 2022 is an altogether different animal. For one thing, audiences are far harder to shock. There is, in addition, the risk that the gratuitous gore and nudity that were signatures of Game of Thrones will today be regarded as exploitative and problematic rather than taboo-breaking.
Even the cast of House of the Dragon seems to think that the flagrant deployment of bared bums has had its day, with star Matt Smith – who plays ambitious Prince Daemon Targaryen – saying that, by his reckoning, the show had too much nudity. “You do find yourself asking, ‘Do we need another sex scene?',” he told Rolling Stone UK.
On the other hand, at least House of the Dragon will not have to clean up the storytelling mess left by Game of Thrones.
That series crashed out with an unsatisfying ending in which whey-faced seer Bran was named King of Westeros and mumbly Jon Snow exiled to the quasi-monastic Night’s Watch – after killing unhinged lover Daenerys Targaryen (prompting her dragon Drogon to fly away in a huff).
It was all honkingly anticlimactic. However, House of the Dragon is set almost 200 years previously, when the dragon-riding Targaryens still rule the Seven Kingdoms (Martin’s strife-ridden answer to Tolkien’s Middle Earth).
The period in Westeros history has been compared by House of the Dragon show-runners Ryan J Condal and Miguel Sapochnik to the United States in the immediate aftermath of the ending of the Cold War in the early 1990s. All Targaryen enemies have been vanquished. An era of perpetual peace stretches towards the horizon. What could go wrong?
How about a destructive war of succession? That’s where we find ourselves in House of the Dragon, as Targaryen royals Princess Rhaenyra (Emma D’Arcy) and Smith’s Daemon, vie for the Iron Throne. There are obvious echoes in that premise of Game of Thrones and the backstabbing and throat-cutting that followed the death of King Robert Baratheon.
The thrilling wrinkle here is that the story takes place in the time before dragons were lost to Westeros. This means the various factions come to the conflict locked and loaded with the ability to incinerate their opponents.
Another complication is that House of the Dragon does not have the battlefield to itself. In 2011, a fantasy series for adults was inevitably looked down upon (at least by mainstream reviewers who lined ups to jeer at the genre). But fantasy is now almost fashionable.
Dungeons and Dragons has become on-trend thanks to Stranger Things. Amazon has ploughed millions into its Middle Earth prequel The Rings of Power – adapted from the appendices to Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings (and essentially telling the origin story of Sauron).
Elsewhere, The Sandman on Netflix has already wooed critics. Series two of The Wheel of Time, for its part, lands on Amazon later this year. A Dungeons and Dragons movie arrives in 2023. House of the Dragon is merely one fantasy among many.
There is one crucial difference, however, between Game of Thrones and House of the Dragon. Game of Thrones was adapted from the (as yet) unfinished A Song Of Ice and Fire novels by George RR Martin (he’s spent the past 11 years on the penultimate instalment, The Winds of Winter, with no publication date in sight).
The more compact story told in House of the Dragon draws on Fire and Blood – Martin’s Old Testament-style history of Westeros. In other words, it already has a start, middle and end. This may encourage those burnt by Game of Thrones to give it a shot. The imponderable HBO will agonise over is whether enough time has passed for Game of Thrones fans to return to Westeros. They will pray this is the case and that House of the Dragon does not go up in flames.
- House of the Dragon is on Sky Atlantic and Sky Now from Monday, August 22
- The Rings of Power (Amazon Prime, September): A lavish prequel to a much-loved fantasy saga? With Rings of Power, Amazon aims to push HBO and House of the Dragon all the way.
- Wheel of Time Season Two (Amazon Prime, tbc): Fans of the Robert Jordan/Brandon Sanderson novels were divided by the first series of Wheel of Time. One issue was the “CosPlay” quality costuming, which made it look as if the actors had just arrived from a fan convention. Still, the casting was spot on, led by Rosamund Pike as mysterious magic-user Moiraine.
- Dungeon and Dragons: Honour Among Thieves (2023): The biggest franchise in fantasy this side of Lord of the Rings, the popular table-top game receives a big-screen reboot next year courtesy of Game Night directors John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein and starring Chris Pine, Michelle Rodriguez, Hugh Grant and Regé-Jean Page.
- The Sandman (out now): Series one of Netflix’s adaptation of the Neil Gaiman graphic novel saga was a knock-out. And now come rumours of a one-off bonus episode featuring a translucent, spiky-quiffed Tom Sturridge as Morpheus, sulky King of Dreams.
