House of the Dragon showrunner doesn’t see The Rings of Power rivalry

For the past few months, one of the biggest media narratives on TV has been the supposed rivalry between HBO’s House of the Dragon and Amazon’s The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. Both shows are prequels to enormous fantasy sagas, both are the current flagship series of their respective networks, and both are airing at pretty much the same time.

But for House of the Dragon showrunner Ryan Condal, this rivalry doesn’t exist; he’s a huge fan of both A Song of Ice and Fire and The Lord of the Rings, and just wants to see more fantasy on TV.

“I read Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion and The Hobbit multiple times growing up, I saw the Peter Jackson movies multiple times in the theaters,” Condal told The Wrap. “I love all that stuff, I love high fantasy, and frankly I want to live in a world where there’s room for all of these things to exist if they’re good. I think the need for more well-made expensive science-fiction/fantasy on television is what all of us nerds want.”

House of the Dragon boss doesn’t see The Rings of Power rivalry: “One feeds the other”

While recent reports have revealed that Amazon executives were supposedly “s***ing their pants” over House of the Dragon’s success, Condal doesn’t see these two massive fantasy shows as necessarily at odds. “I don’t think that somebody watching Rings of Power means they’re not watching House of the Dragon, I don’t see it that way,” he said. “I see one feeds the other, and I think the more good quality genre entertainment on television, the more it’s gonna draw in the general public who might not be so predisposed to watching this.”

"We have to remember back to when Game of Thrones aired, there was a lot of resistance around sort of ‘normies’ watching that show because they thought it was silly or goofy, but they got sucked in by the adult way in which George [R.R. Martin] and David [Benioff] and Dan [Weiss] told the story, the surprising turns of it, the way it actually turned fantasy on its ear. George, as a huge Tolkien fan, actually takes a lot of Tolkien’s – they weren’t tropes when Tolkien wrote them, but they became tropes over the decades when everybody else tried to ape Tolkien and turned them on their head and surprised people in a way, and that’s what drew people into the show."

Condal is certainly right that Game of Thrones was a dark horse bet for HBO when it first aired; people didn’t know if adults would buy into a high budget fantasy production. It’s almost hard to imagine nowadays, when fantasy and science fiction shows are all the rage in prestige television.

“People are much more willing now in 2022 than they were in 2011 to put a Targaryen flag on the back of their car or to admit that they watch the show at the watercooler at the hedge fund or whatever it is,” Condal said. “This has made fantasy mainstream and I think the more of these good, high-quality shows that come along make fantasy more mainstream. And then it makes a bigger audience, it means more of these shows can be made and be made in an interesting way that’s not just popcorn mass entertainment, it’s something with something hopefully interesting to say.”

George R.R. Martin wants as many fantasy shows on TV as possible

A Song of Ice and Fire author George R.R. Martin echoed Condal in a new entry on his Not A Blog:

"Ryan [told The Wrap] pretty much the same thing I said in that interview with THE INDEPENDENT a few months back. Nothing would please him more than to see both shows succeed. Me too. I am a fantasy fan, and I want more fantasy on television, and nothing would accomplish that more than a couple of big hits. THE WITCHER, SHADOW & BONE, WHEEL OF TIME… and THE SANDMAN, a glorious adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s groundbreaking comic series… those are a good start, but I want more. I want Tad Williams, I want Joe Abercrombie, I want Patrick Rothfuss, I want a good adaptation of Le Guin’s Earthsea books, I want Alan Garner, I want Robin Hobb… oh, the list is long, I could go on and on… and would if I did not have a zillion other things to do. Most of all, I want Roger Zelazny’s NINE PRINCES IN AMBER. I will never understand why Corwin and his siblings are not starring in their own show. And hey, if epic fantasy continues to do well, maybe we will finally get that. A boy can dream."

Ah, the beauty of the words Martin weaves. I want to live in a world with all those series he named; HBO, how long will it take you to realize that Joe Abercrombie writes exactly the kind of gritty fantasy you love?

Beyond just dreams of how many fantasy and sci-fi shows could one day grace our screens, Condal also made the great point that the more these various shows succeed, the more networks are likely to invest in them. We are, after all, living during a time when the most expensive show ever made is a fantasy series.

“As we know, these shows are not cheap to make, and they’re dangerous ventures because you have to invest a lot of money up front to figure out if it works or not,” Condal explained. “We want studios in a willing-to-take-risk mode, we don’t want them in a risk-averse mode, because that’s where good art comes from.”

If you want to prove Condal and Martin right, this is a great week to get in on both of these shows. The Rings of Power airs its season finale this Friday on Prime Video, while the penultimate episode of House of the Dragon season 1 hits HBO and HBO Max on Sunday.

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