HBO’s Game of Thrones prequel series House of the Dragon has wrapped on its first season, and by pretty much any account, it’s been a success. Critics like it, audiences like it, and it’s greenlit for a second season.
There’s no one person behind a series as big as this, but at the moment, the guy most clearly in charge is Ryan Condal, who served as showrunner on the first season alongside Miguel Sapochnik and talks regularly with Fire & Blood author George R.R. Martin, who wrote the source material. Condal and Martin had been friends for years before HBO asked Martin for input on spinoffs. The author reached out to Condal because of how big a fan he was of the books.
“It was fairly ordained in terms of what George was giving me,” Condal told Entertainment Weekly. “It was this specific period in history. This is the thing that he wanted to cover. As soon as I heard it, I said, ‘Of course! This is the spin-off that should be made.’ Coming off of that epic original series that David [Benioff] and Dan [Weiss] did, being able to then tell the story of the beginnings of how the Targaryens lost their power, essentially, was the next place to go if you’re telling a prequel that’s thematically tied to the themes of the flagship series. So it just made sense for me.”
House of the Dragon boss determined to make “a faithful adaptation” of George R.R. Martin’s book
Once Condal and company knew they were going to be making a show about the Dance of the Dragons, the flowery name given to a brutal civil war fought between rival factions of the Tagaryen dynasty, the first question to answer was when to start it. Martin, who is known for loving detailed worldbuilding, wanted to start very early in the timeline. HBO wanted to get into the thick of the action. “I said, ‘Well, I think there’s a happy medium in between where we do have an elegant first act to introduce all the players in this massive, very complex chessboard, get a lot of the early infighting, but also tell the story of this Greek tragedy, this family that tears itself apart from within,” Condal remembered.
In the end, the first episode opens with a brief scene at the Great Council of 101, when Viserys Targaryen is chosen over his cousin Rhaenys as heir to the Iron Throne. From there we skip to the middle of Viserys’ reign and carry on through the years.
Generally, the show has been pretty faithful to the book, which Condal sees as him fulfilling a promise he made to Martin. “I was going to render a faithful adaptation of his books and make a series that I would wanna see as a fan. And I feel like I’ve done that.”
That said, changes have been made; Rhaenys Targaryen certainly doesn’t burst through the floor on her dragon during Aegon’s coronation in the book, for instance. “There are things that we’re going to do in this show that [George is] not going to love or get right out of the box,” Condal said. “I’m always going to listen and I’m always gonna put this material in front of you and we’re always gonna have a talk about it.”
House of the Dragon showrunner knows he’ll make some choices not all fans will like
So far, the show has gone over well with pretty much everybody, from hardcore Song of Ice and Fire devotees to newcomers to Martin himself. That said, fanbases have been known to be fickle, and there has been some pushback. For instance, some fans didn’t like the scene from the season finale where Daemon Targaryen strangled his wife Rhaenyra, arguing that it went against what we’d seen of the character. Condal, for his part, is having none of it. “Yeah, please explain to me and George who Daemon is as a character, everybody,” he laughed.
"I mean… he killed his wife [Rhea Royce earlier in the season]. We’ve seen Daemon do very questionable things all season long, but he’s being played incredibly by an actor who’s exuding charisma. He’s fun and fascinating and dangerous the way these great Game of Thrones characters are, like Bronn [Jerome Flynn] and Jamie [Nikolaj Coster-Waldau] and the Red Viper [Pascal]. We’re really drawn to those characters as an audience, but that doesn’t mean that they are unimpeachable heroes that are not capable of doing really questionable things."
Condal wants to lean into that sort of ambiguity, which I think is a good fit for a show like this. “Your loyalties for certain characters and for certain sides and for certain arguments will shift and change over the course of this,” he said. “That’s the nature of this thing. It’s incredibly messy and complex and gray, and it’s one family fighting each other. This is not Starks vs. Lannisters. This is an extended family doing battle with one another. So it’s harder to find those entrenched sides.”
"I’ve done a lot of work, hopefully successful work, to try to show them that I am one of them. I come to this show as a massive, longtime fan of the books: I read the books multiple times, I’ve listened to all the audio books, I’ve now read Fire & Blood probably more times than any volume of the Song of Ice and Fire, I communicate with George regularly. I am as in it as you can be. I am still going to make choices that not all of you are going to like, but, on the whole, I am really looking after the sanctity and wellbeing of George’s work. I care about it immensely as both a fan and as the steward and the showrunner. As long as I can lay my head on the pillow at night knowing that I have brought that kind of love and fidelity to his work, then I feel like I’ve done my job."
House of the Dragon could tell stories set before and after the Dance of the Dragons
House of the Dragon season 1 was more than good enough for Condal to be given grace by fans, and I’ll definitely be looking forward to what he and his team will do with the show going forward. Things are going to get a lot crazier and more action-packed, and Condal will need to bring the lessons he learned as a producer on shows like Colony to bear. “Even House of Dragon has a limited pool of resources. It’s a giant Olympic-size swimming pool, but you have to figure out how to best take those resources and put them up on the screen and not waste a dollar in terms of anything that you spend. It’s a thing that you can only learn by doing it.”
"You have to solve a problem and you have to solve it on one of the sets that you already have with the actors that you have. You can’t suddenly just get on a plane and go to Portugal because you have this new idea."
As for how long House of the Dragon might last, he’s not committing to anything (although Martin himself has suggested that the show needs to run for at least four seasons). “I ultimately don’t know yet how much time we need to tell the story because the Dance of the Dragons is a very long and very specific episode in the Targaryen dynasty,” Condal said. “But the thing is, from the point where we leave off this season, we have 150 years of history still of Targaryens in power. So I think the question with this story is more: Where do you let the curtain fall?”
He suspects things will become more clear with season 2. And beyond that, anything could happen. Might House of the Dragon even depict other events from the long and storied history of the Targaryen dynasty?
"That to me is the real promise of Fire & Blood. It’s such a rich history. I, as an author, writer, fan, want to tell a whole bunch of stories now that it’s not just the Dance of the Dragons, but the things that preceded to the things that led to it. What happens 50 years after when they’re still in power, but they don’t have any dragons left? I think those are the interesting things to me, and I think that’s the thing that keeps this fresh and alive, because there’s a lot of other themes to be explored within the different facets of the Targaryen dynasty."
As for House of the Dragon, expect season 2 to come along sometime in 2024.
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