HBO's next Game of Thrones prequel, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, will break from its predecessors in a number of interesting ways, from its lighter tone to its new music composer to its ground-up approach to Westeros. Now we know another way the series will differentiate itself from Thrones and House of the Dragon: its episodes will only be around a half hour long.
This comes courtesy of Collider's Perri Nemiroff, who sat down with showrunner Ira Parker following the show's press run at New York Comic Con last week. Nemiroff asked Parker how the finished show stacked up to his initial expectations back when he was first approached about the project. His answer reveals some interesting insights into how HBO shaped its newest Game of Thrones series.
“Being, obviously, a huge Game of Thrones fan and a writer on House of the Dragon, I assumed that this was going to be 10 hour-long episodes every season," Parker recalled. "Obviously, these novellas are shorter. They are not the massive tomes that we get to enjoy for the other series, so I thought we were going to combine them, bring it all together, bring in elements of the Blackfyre Rebellion pretty immediately.”
The Blackfyre Rebellion is a crucial event in Westeros' history, where a faction of Targaryen bastards tried to stake their own claim on the Iron Throne. There were more than one of these Blackfyre Rebellions over the years, but the first is the most important for how it shook up the balance of power in the Seven Kingdoms. George R.R. Martin's Tales of Dunk and Egg novellas kick off in the shadow of that first Blackfyre Rebellion, so they're very much shaped by this large world event in the same way that Game of Thrones is shaped by Robert's Rebellion. However, that doesn't really become relevant until the second book, The Sworn Sword.
But all that's information we can save for another day, since the television show's shorter runtime means it didn't need to pull in plotlines from future books. Instead, its first season strictly adapts the events of Martin's first novella, The Hedge Knight.
“When I heard that it was going to be six episodes and they wanted to do shorter half-hour episodes, I was like,‘Great.’ That means we can do one novella a season," Parker said. "That means we can start the way that we're supposed to start and just follow Dunk in his journey into this world. We can be ground up. We can be slow. We can be intimate and just give people a little enjoyment, a little treat inside this world.”
Why half-hour episodes are a perfect fit for A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms
From where I'm sitting, it sounds like HBO made a very smart decision to pare back the scale for A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms. This isn't a situation where the studio tried to cheap out, though obviously I'm sure their accounting department was thrilled that this new prequel cost significantly less than House of the Dragon. (A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms cost around $10 million an episode, as opposed to HOTD's roughly $20 million an episode in season 1 and likely significantly more in season 2, when dragons started tearing each other from the sky.) Rather, a shorter run perfectly suits the shorter stories of The Tales of Dunk and Egg.
Both Game of Thrones and House of the Dragon adapted vast, complex source material replete with large-scale battles, kingdom-altering political struggles, and more. By contrast, The Tales of Dunk and Egg stays tight to Dunk's perspective. Each book is a discreet little adventure for our honorable knight and his precocious squire, and so far none of them have spanned more than 200 page long.
Sure, HBO could have gone the route of Apple TV+'s Murderbot and added a bunch of extra material to pad out a full 10 episodes for the season. But I don't think A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms is as well-suited for that. The Hedge Knight works as well as it does in part because of its tight, gripping pacing; fluffing things out would almost certainly have detracted from that strength. Not to mention it probably would have ticked off Martin, who made a public show of his frustration with House of the Dragon for such deviations from his source material last year.
I can very easily imagine how the story of The Hedge Knight as Martin wrote it could break down into six half-hour blocks. By going with this format, HBO may just give us its most faithful adaptation of George R.R. Martin's work yet. Martin himself seems to think so.
“I loved [The Hedge Knight], and when I finished it I said this is one of the best things I’ve ever done. And I still feel that way. I still feel these stories are some of the best I’ve ever done. And [producer Ira Parker] and his amazing team have done an amazing job of adapting them, and what you see is going to be very similar to what I wrote," he said at New York Comic Con (via Popverse).
We'll see how the new half-hour format works for A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms when it premieres on January 18, 2026 at 10:00 p.m. ET on HBO and HBO Max.