2022 was a huge year for science fiction and fantasy on TV. From big HBO series like House of the Dragon, Westworld, and His Dark Materials to The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power on Amazon, Stranger Things season 4 on Netflix, and a slew of new Marvel and Star Wars offerings on Disney+, there were so many great series that it was often hard to even keep up with them all. If the end of Game of Thrones signaled a new era of TV where every studio wanted their own big-budget fantasy show, 2022 was the year those ambitions fully came to fruition.
Alas, one side effect of our current genre show boom is that it’s not quick or easy or cheap to create these fantastical worlds. With shows getting more and more complex, two-year gaps between seasons have become the norm. So even though we may have met some new favorite characters this past year, we’ll be waiting a while to see them again.
We can at least mentally prepare ourselves for the long wait. Here are seven shows that we know won’t return until 2024.
1. House of the Dragon
There were a lot of shows to get excited about this past year, but the biggest may have been House of the Dragon, a Game of Thrones prequel series set nearly 200 years before the original show.
We knew HBO was developing a number of Game of Thrones spinoffs, but we didn’t know if they would be any good. Happily, House of the Dragon was quite good. Its first season covered roughly three decades of Targaryen family history, setting up the civil war known as the Dance of the Dragons while simultaneously getting us to love and hate various members of its sprawling cast. It all led to a fateful encounter in the skies over Storm’s End where Aemond Targaryen’s monstrously huge dragon Vhagar chomped Lucerys Velaryon and his mount Arrax into bits.
The season ended with Rhaenyra Targaryen, the usurped Queen of the Seven Kingdoms, glaring furiously into the camera as she received news of her son’s death. It’ll be a minute before we see what her next move is, however; House of the Dragon season 2 will begin filming in early 2023, and HBO Programming President Casey Bloys confirmed that season 2 will not air until at least 2024. Until then, our watch continues.