Last week, it seemed like Game of Thrones fans were beset on all sides by sobering news. First, we learned that the show may be ending sooner than we thought. Last year, HBO president Michael Lombardo said he expected the show to run for eight seasons, and we assumed that meant Seasons 7 and 8 would consist of the standard 10 episodes. But last week, showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss said that the final two seasons may be shortened (their plan is for a seven-episode Season 7 and a six-episode Season 8). And then they said no one was contemplating spin-offs. What are Game of Thrones fan supposed to do? Not spend their leisure time obsessing over a return to Westeros? Pah on that.
It’s important to note that none of these developments are set in stone yet. Benioff and Weiss, or others at HBO, may consider spin-offs once Game of Thrones is closer to wrapping up, and considering how popular the show has been, it’s hard to believe they won’t. George R.R. Martin, author of the Song of Ice and Fire series, told Entertainment Weekly that “here is certainly no lack of material” for spin-offs.
"Every episode of The Naked City – one of the television shows I watched as a kid – ended with a voice-over: ‘There are eight million stories in the naked city. This has been one of them.’ There are eight million stories in Westeros as well … and even more in Essos and the lands beyond. A whole world full of stories, waiting to be told … if indeed HBO is interested."
And which of the many stories in Martin’s world are best fit for a spin-off? “The most natural follow-up would be an adaptation of my Dunk & Egg stories,” he said.
The Dunk and Egg stories are a series of three novellas set almost a hundred years before the events of Game of Thrones. They revolve around Ser Duncan the Tall (Dunk), a hedge knight who eventually becomes a member of the Kingsguard, and Aegon V Targaryen (Egg), his squire (Maester Aemon, who was alive back then, mentioned Egg briefly during Season 5). The novellas were collected and published in A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, available everywhere.
“Each of the novellas could easily be done as a two-hour stand-alone movie for television; that would probably be the ideal way to do them, rather than as an ongoing weekly series,” Martin said. “The Hedge Knight and its sequels are lighter than A Song of Ice and Fire, more in the realm of action/adventure.”
As far as something more like Game of Thrones goes, Martin thinks that the Dance of the Dragons, the Targaryen civil war Shireen mentioned in Season 5, would do the trick. Still, at this point, nothing’s official, but we can dream.