House of the Dragon is a prequel to Game of Thrones, which is not only the biggest show in the history of HBO, but one of the biggest of the 2010s and maybe TV history. Showrunner Ryan Condal had a lot of pressure on him to deliver ahead of the show's first season in 2022. “I think that’s actually a gift is coming into this incredibly well-realized world. I think the daunting part is trying to follow the most successful television series of all time and daring to think you have something to say in that universe,” he said recently in an interview with GoldDerby.
House of the Dragon and Game of Thrones are very different shows. For one, House of the Dragon is set well over 100 years before Game of Thrones. And while Game of Thrones told a sprawling story about characters from several different houses trying to get one over on each other, House of the Dragon mostly zeroes in on the Targaryen family, which has become divided against itself. As Condal put it, it's essentially "a Greek tragedy about this one family.”
There's also the difference in source material. While Game of Thrones was based on George R.R. Martin A Song of Ice and Fire novel series, House of the Dragon is based on his book Fire & Blood, which is written as a sort of fake history tome. "So you have a lot of sketches of things, of characters, of ideas, of events in history, but you don’t really have all the details that were present in the original books that the original series was based on. So there is a ton of invention required,” Condal said.
To adapt a book that unique, the team spends around "six months to a year" writing. "And there’s just lots of iterations, and lots of Google documents and tracking documents, and lots of index cards up on the board," Condal said. "And I think we just try to break the individual character stories against the plot points that we know we need to hit and then figure out how to interweave them.” That part is tricky, but also, according to Condal, "in many ways, the most fun."
In interpreting the text of Fire & Blood, Condal and his team have created some great TV moments, like King Viserys making his long walk to the Iron Throne in the season 1 episode "The Lord of the Tides," But they've also drawn criticism from people as high up the chain as Martin himself, especially after the second season — which wrapped up in August — majorly changed a lot of important things about the book.
At least within the fan community, House of the Dragon is in something of a strange place heading into season 3, what with Martin's critiques hanging over things. Before new episodes start dropping in 2026, we'll get treated to a new Game of Thrones prequel called A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, which is coming out next year. We'll see how everything sits together as the Game of Thrones universe expands.
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