Game of Thrones prequel show will “trust the audience”

The man behind House of the Dragon intends to treat fans with respect. “Audiences are really smart…they don’t want to be spoon fed everything.”

Ryan Condal is one of the co-showrunners on House of the Dragon, HBO’s follow-up to Game of Thrones. Set 200 years before the original show, it tells the story of a brutal civil war fought between different factions of the Targaryen family, and it looks to be shaping up nicely.

A prequel is an interesting beast: by now a lot of people know the basics about the world of Game of Thrones, but House of the Dragon has a whole new cast of characters to get to know and a whole new scenario to become familiar with. That means there’s going to be some exposition as we learn who’s related to who and so forth. But how much exposition do you need? And at what point does exposition become clunky and boring?

Condal talked about that on a recent episode of the The Ugly American Werewolf in London podcast, which is mostly about rock music but which took a break from that to talk movies and TV with Condal. Condal called exposition “a necessary evil” and thinks the writers job is to gussy it up so the audience learns what they need to know without losing interest. And in the case of House of the Dragon, he had a head start.

“The job on House of the Dragon was actually much easier than it would have been had I been creating the original series,” Condal said. “All credit to [Game of Thrones showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss and creator George R.R. Martin] having come before me. They did all this work for me. So I don’t have to explain anything about what a Targaryen is or what Westeros is or what an Iron Throne is.”

"The first thing is always the hardest…When that work is cleverly done in the first go, as it was by David and Dan…the work of the person who follows becomes that much easier. So yes, there is exposition in the series, cause you have to settled into the new timeline that they’re in and also with these characters and the things that they’re dealing with and all that, but so much of that heavy lifting has already been done that the audience coming in knows what they stuff is so you can cleverly sort of feather in things and reference things and they will pick it up and carry it on the way."

Condal sounds like he has a good handle on writing technique, which is encouraging. He also wants to trust in the audience’s intelligence, something Game of Thrones did very well, especially in its earlier seasons:

"You really have to trust your audiences. Audiences are really smart and they want it to be an interactive experience, they don’t want to be spoon fed everything, they want to have to lean forward in their chair and listen and put things together and say, “Oh, I know what that is and that is.” And that’s what makes them engage with your work. So it has to be accessible, because if it’s inaccessible you just lose everybody. But the trick is walking that balance and figuring out the least amount of information possible to carry people along the way."

Hear, hear.

House of the Dragon will premiere on HBO and HBO max sometime in 2022.

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