When a popular book is adapted for the screen, how faithful to the source material is the adaptation obliged to be? Different producers give very different answers. Modern TV shows like Invincible and The Last of Us adapt their source material very faithfully, although they add and finesse things along the way. (It's worth noting that, in both of those cases, the creators of the source material are closely involved in the productions.) But then you look at a series like The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, which is based on the appendices to J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings books. Some of what's written there makes its way in, but most of the show is completely made up.
Then there's a series like House of the Dragon, which is based on the book Fire & Blood by George R.R. Martin. While the first season of the show stayed mostly grounded in the text (with some notable exceptions), the second season started to stray very far away from that story. According to Martin, the show could get even further away from the source material in the upcoming third season, and he's not happy about it. Martin took the drastic step of airing his grievances on his blog, taking direct aim at plot points coming up and warning fans that "there are larger and more toxic butterflies to come, if HOUSE OF THE DRAGON goes ahead with some of the changes being contemplated for seasons 3 and 4…"
Martin deleted that blog post shortly after it went up, but you get the idea that he is very uncomfortable with the extreme liberties the House of the Dragon writing team has taken with his book. You can't help but think of his issues with the show when he writes about adaptation more generally, like in this ostensibly unrelated blog post from May of 2024:
"Everywhere you look, there are more screenwriters and producers eager to take great stories and “make them their own.” It does not seem to matter whether the source material was written by Stan Lee, Charles Dickens, Ian Fleming, Roald Dahl, Ursula K. Le Guin, J.R.R. Tolkien, Mark Twain, Raymond Chandler, Jane Austen, or… well, anyone. No matter how major a writer it is, no matter how great the book, there always seems to be someone on hand who thinks he can do better, eager to take the story and “improve” on it. “The book is the book, the film is the film,” they will tell you, as if they were saying something profound. Then they make the story their own.
They never make it better, though. Nine hundred ninety-nine times out of a thousand, they make it worse."
And Martin is still beating this drum. As reported by Los Siete Reinos, the author recently appeared at the Miami International Science Fiction Film Festival to promote Mary Margaret Road-Grader, a short film based on the work of Howard Waldrop that Martin produced. A Redditor attended his Q&A session and relayed that Martin talked "about adaptations and how important he feels about trying to adapt faithfully. He emphasized that point."
Martin also highlighted the value of faithfulness when he wrote about a new Game of Thrones prequel series coming to HBO this year: A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, based on his Dunk and Egg novellas. "I’ve seen all six episodes now (the last two in rough cuts, admittedly), and I loved them," he wrote. "Dunk and Egg have always been favorites of mine, and the actors we found to portray them are just incredible. The rest of the cast are terrific as well...It’s as faithful as adaptation as a reasonable man could hope for (and you all know how incredibly reasonable I am on that particular subject)."
Obviously faithfulness isn't the only thing that matters to Martin, or to anyone, but I don't think he's overreaching by returning to this theme. It would be one thing if the changes made to the source material in a show like House of the Dragon resulted in a better, richer, more dramatic show...but at least if you ask me, the opposite has happened. I still enjoy the show, but the best episodes are definitely the ones that stick closest to the source material, while the worst are those that go far afield of it.
You would hope that TV writers and producers would notice this pattern and adjust accordingly. But if we're talking about whether or not the creative class in Hollywood cares about fidelity, it seems to be a crapshoot.
We'll see how House of the Dragon fares when it airs its third season in 2026. As for A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, expect that to premiere later this year.
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