How House of the Dragon rose from the ashes

Game of Thrones ended in 2019. It was the most successful series HBO had ever made, by far. Naturally, the executives wanted a spinoff.

The only problem was that HBO had literally never made a spinoff of anything in its many decades as a network (it has now, thanks to HBO Max; witness the very successful Sex and the City spinoff And Just Like That…). HBO isn’t Disney; it doesn’t crap out spinoffs and sequels to absolutely everything ad nauseam, so there was a lot of trepidation internally about what to do after Thrones.

“They were understandably very nervous about failing and not living up to the original series,” one insider told The Hollywood Reporter, which just published a terrific article about the creation of House of the Dragon, the Game of Thrones prequel show premiering next month. “I don’t think there was much confidence internally [that Thrones was a franchise] because the show was so big and so seminal,” said HBO executive Francesca Orsi. “We saw it as an opportunity to keep telling great stories, but not necessarily to try and replace Game of Thrones as the most epic show in history.”

The War of the Five Pitches

The network began its search for a spinoff with the man who started it all: author George R.R. Martin, whose A Song of Ice and Fire novels birthed Game of Thrones. He came in with two pitches: a story about the Dance of the Dragons, which is the show that would eventually become House of the Dragon; and a series based on his comparatively light-hearted Tales of Dunk and Egg novellas. HBO rejected the second pitch at the time (it’s now in development, thank goodness), but liked the first. “Dance had all the intrigue, competition for the Iron Throne, murders, duels, big battles, 20 dragons — all of that stuff,” Martin told THR.

But things didn’t go as planned. To develop the series, HBO paired Martin with writer Carly Wray, who’d written on shows like Westworld and Watchmen. But she and Martin couldn’t agree on when the tale should begin; the Dance of the Dragons is a war, but Martin’s book Fire & Blood spends a lot of time exploring the events that lead to the conflict. Knowing the kind of writer Martin is, I’m betting he wanted to start pretty far back.

Next, HBO entertained a pitch for The Dance of the Dragons from Bryan Cogman, who wrote excellent episodes of Game of Thrones like “The Laws of Gods and Men” and “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms.” For some reason, HBO passed on his pitch.

Cogman was rock solid dependable on Thrones, so it’s hard to believe his ideas weren’t up to snuff. The way THR tells it, it sounds like HBO was tripping over its own reputation at this point. Alongside The Dance of the Dragons, it was also developing four other potential prequel series. HBO is the network that innovates, the network that pushes boundaries, and it may have feared that The Dance of the Dragons was a little too safe, a little too similar to the original series.

“At first HBO was like, ‘How can we subvert [Thrones]?’” recalled Game of Thrones director Miguel Sapochnik, who went on to become one of the two showrunners on House of the Dragon. “The Dance of Dragons felt like an obvious straight-down-the-line prequel. So I think they were less hot on it because it was like, ‘Well, who wants to see more Game of Thrones?’ And then the irony, of course, is: lots of people.”

Ryan Condal, the other showrunner, agreed. “The desire at HBO was to not just offer up a sequel that’s about the war for the throne. They wanted to do something so totally different that it would blow everybody’s minds. I think that’s why they went with The Long Night instead.”

The failure of Bloodmoon

The Long Night is one of a couple names for a Game of Thrones prequel series that HBO not only greenlit, but actually made a full pilot for; Naomi Watts, Miranda Richardson and the guy who plays Vecna on Stranger Things all got into costume for this, only for the pilot to be rejected and locked up so tight that not even George R.R. Martin has seen it.

The title most commonly associated with this mystery show was Bloodmoon, and it sounded pretty unique. Set thousands of years before Game of Thrones, it told a story involving the creation of the White Walkers. “Bloodmoon really stood out as different, with unique world-building,” Orsi said. “Tonally it felt very adult, sophisticated and intelligent, and there was a thematic conversation at the center of it about disenfranchisement in the face of colonialism and religious extremism.”

I will say this: Bloodmoon does sound riskier than House of the Dragon, and remember: HBO prides itself on taking risks…but it’s possible to be too bold. George R.R. Martin had barely written anything about this period of history, and one insider claims he expressed his doubts about the project to HBO. “Bloodmoon was a very difficult assignment,” Martin said. “We’re dealing with a much more primitive people. There were no dragons yet. A lot of the pilot revolved around a wedding of a Southern house to a Northern house and it got into the whole history of the White Walkers.”

In the end, HBO decided to pass on the pilot. “It wasn’t unwatchable or horrible or anything,” said former WarnerMedia executive Robert Greenblatt. “It was very well produced and looked extraordinary. But it didn’t take me to the same place as the original series. It didn’t have that depth and richness that the original series’ pilot did.”

And so, now that HBO had gotten its “wE hAVe to iNnOvATe” jollies out of its system, it turned back to what people really wanted: more Game of Thrones.

The rise of House of the Dragon

Although I’m being kind of glib above. According to THR, there were a couple factors in HBO’s decision to pivot back to the more familiar Dance of the Dragons. For one, the network had seen the backlash to the final season of Game of Thrones, which many fans complained was rushed. Paired with the failure of Bloodmoon, the network figured it might want to do a little less innovating and a little more listening to George R.R. Martin, who made all of this possible in the first place.

And George R.R. Martin wanted to do The Dance of the Dragons; he had from the beginning, HBO just took a little detour. With HBO now giving more weight to his advice, Martin recommended writer Ryan Condal as the guy to spearhead the project; the two had been friends for years, ever since Condal, by his own admission, “stalked” Martin and asked him to dinner early in his career. “I’ve been a fan of these books for 20 years,” Condal said. “I was a fan of Game of Thrones — I watched the pilot the night it aired on HBO and every episode after.”

"You can’t follow Thrones, it’s the Beatles. I’m setting out as a fan to make the thing I want to see, and I’m happy with what we’ve achieved. The Targaryens are like the Jedi in Star Wars, where you heard about this time when they were plentiful and powerful and always wanted to see that. And now you get to."

Condal has Martin’s full support. “I liked Ryan’s writing and he really knew my world well — which was a big thing,” the author said. But House of the Dragon, like Game of Thrones, has two showrunners; the tight partnership between David Benioff and Dan Weiss had been hugely successful over the course of the original show, and HBO wanted another strong foundation. So Miguel Sapochnik returned to Westeros…although it took some convincing. “Miguel said, ‘I’m never doing Thrones again,’” Condal recalled.

Somehow or another, Sapochnik got over that. His directorial strategy for House of the Dragon is, “If it ain’t broken, don’t fix it,” which HBO responded to. “I think season eight had been divisive, Bloodmoon hadn’t worked out for them, and they wanted to retain their fans,” Sapochnik said. “They wanted to come back to what they knew.”

So Sapochnik is advocating for continuity on the directing side. On the writing side of things, Condal wants to keep things as faithful as possible to Martin’s work. I have no doubt that some things will be changed for the show, but based on what we’ve seen, they’re keeping it very close to the text; for instance, they’re including events like the Great Council of 101, which I can imagine less patient writers dropping in favor of getting to the action.

An example for the road: there are a lot of hard-to-remember names in Fire & Blood, just like there are in A Song of Ice and Fire. There’s a funny anecdote in the article about cast member Matt Smith (Daemon Targaryen) struggling to remember the names of all the dragons. There are two important characters named Rhaenyra and Rhaenys. It’s accurate, sure — real medieval history is full of duplicative names; go ahead and Google how many King Edwards there were — but it asks a lot of the audience.

But House of the Dragon is sticking to its guns. “You know we have to change some names,” Sapochnik once told Condal, who replied: “We can’t.”

House of the Dragon premiers on August 21. High may it fly.

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