The second season of House of the Dragon — based on the book Fire & Blood by Game of Thrones creator George R.R. Martin — returns to HBO and Max this summer. The first season was a big hit, and I'm definitely curious to see what happens next as Rhaenyra Targaryen goes to war against her half-brother Aegon for the Iron Throne. But it has been a minute since we got a new episode. Are people still interested?
Whether it's House of the Dragon, The Wheel of Time, Stranger Things or The Mandalorian, It seems like no network or streaming service has been able to regularly release new seasons of a big expensive genre show on a yearly basis. HBO may have a partial solution: House of the Dragon is still coming out at a rate of one season every other year, but what if the network aired a different Game of Thrones spinoff during the gap year? That seems to be the plan with the new show A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms: The Hedge Knight, based on Martin's Dunk and Egg novellas.
While House of the Dragon tells the story of an inter-family civil war as big and sprawling as anything fans remember from Game of Thrones, the Dunk and Egg novels are much more contained, small-scale affairs. They follow the adventures of the knight Ser Duncan the Tall and his squire Egg (actually Prince Aegon Targaryen) as they wander around Westeros getting into scraps and helping people. The show is set decades after the events of House of the Dragon and decades before the events of Game of Thrones. Once again, we're looking at a whole new cast.
We still don't know who those cast members are, but HBO must have some people in place, because Redanian Intelligence reports filming is set to kick off on June 3, which is more or less in line with predictions. That's according to trade rag Production List, which also lists a couple of potential new writers for the show: Annie Julia Wyman, who works on the Max crime drama Tokyo Vice and wrote for the Netflix dramedy The Chair alongside Game of Thrones creators David Benioff and Dan Weiss; and Aziza Barnes, who's worked on projects like Snowfall and Teenage Bounty Hunters. Also on board is Ira Parker, who wrote one of the best episodes from the first season of House of the Dragon: "King of the Narrow Sea."
Filming for A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms is set to go down in and around Belfast, Northern Ireland, which also served as the home base for filming on Game of Thrones. We don't have a firm release date set yet, but odds are good that HBO wants this show ready for 2025, which is very doable given that it's easier to make than House of the Dragon; dragons are extinct by the time of The Hedge Knight, so there's no need to spend time animating those fearsome money-sinks.
And again, I imagine HBO wants to give Game of Thrones fans something to watch while they wait for new seasons of House of the Dragon. And who knows? Maybe A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms will blow up and House of the Dragon will give its fans something to watch as they wait for new seasons of it. It may not be one new season every year, but it's something.
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