House of the Dragon drops surprise podcast with showrunner Ryan Condal about the "challenge" of adaptation

It is a spicy day in Westeros, my friends. Today, author George R.R. Martin made good on his promise to air some of his issues with House of the Dragon season 2, a TV adaptation of a portion of his book Fire & Blood. In particular, Martin talked about Maelor Targaryen, the youngest child of Helaena and Aegon Targaryen who was cut from the show, and how his absence effected the infamous Blood and Cheese incident.

But that wasn't all. Martin also got into specifics for how Maelor's absence will affect things down the line for Helaena in House of the Dragon season 3...and he didn't sound optimistic. It was a fiery post, so fiery that Martin has since taken it off his site. But the internet is forever, and you can read our analysis of it here.

Just when you thought things were interesting enough, there's more. The official House of the Dragon podcast dropped a surprise episode today, where hosts Jason Concepcion and Greta Johnsen interviewed none other than House of the Dragon showrunner Ryan Condal about the challenges of book-to-screen adaptations, which feels...well, pretty timely, considering there's absolutely no chance HBO wasn't aware of Martin's blog post from last week that made headlines where he said he was going to air "everything that's gone wrong with House of the Dragon."

Ryan Condal speaks out on the "challenge" of adapting books to screen

I say that this was a "surprise" episode of the House of the Dragon podcast because it wasn't originally planned to be released. At the top of the podcast, Concepcion and Johnsen explain how they received so many questions from fans about page-to-screen changes that they decided to invite Condal onto the podcast for a special episode, since no one would be able to speak to House of the Dragon's deviations from Fire & Blood better than its showrunner. The timing, surely, was only a coincidence.

"It's a challenge," Condal said. "I mean, obviously we're dealing with a well-known world with a massive fanbase that's following the biggest and most successful television series of all time, so...you have to sort of absorb that as step one. We have to respect that and approach the material with, I think, as much reverence as possible. And respect. I've done that since day one. But it's important to draw the line between reverence and worship. And I think, just as in the real world, there's a thin but dangerous line between religion and cult. And it's something that we walk all the time. And I always see myself as the sort of arbiter of that as a fan of these books."

Condal went on to discuss how deeply immersed he is in the lore of Fire & Blood, how he's been a fan of Westeros for upwards of 20 years, and how the team behind the show essentially works all year round whether you think they're working or not. It's nice to hear from Condal about how committed he is to his vision for the show. He also touched on how adapting a fake history book like Fire & Blood presents different challenges than a traditional novel.

"Unlike A Song of Ice and Fire or A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, Fire & Blood is a history book. It's not a narrative," Condal explained. "It's not written in point of view. It is a history described by three unreliable narrators. There are intentional holes in this historical fabric. That's part of the fun in the way that it was written."

"And I think the other thing to highlight too is that there aren't characters in this text, per se, but rather historical figures. Now of course, Daemon and Alicent and Rhaenyra are all characters because they are people who occupy a fictional world, but the way that they are covered in the historical text is the way that any historical figure would be covered in a history book. So, as dramatists, I think we have to approach this history, though it is fictional, as anyone would do as trying to adapt a chapter from real history."

- Ryan Condal

Now, I'm just gonna come right out here and say that I personally very much disagree with this reasoning, though the broad strokes are pretty fair. Yes, Fire & Blood is a fake history book which is purposely presented in a way that's ambiguous, with a maester sifting through multiple accounts of events. But it's also George R.R Martin's telling of these events, which means the history isn't actually as ambiguous as it seems at face value. Typically, even if there are three different versions of events, Martin will strongly hint that one of them is actually true — or, barring that, outright admit that it's something no one will ever know. So yes, it's a history book, but it's a history book written by an author who does know the actual truth of things.

This sort of logic has resulted in some great scenes in House of the Dragon, like when Aemond torched his brother Aegon over Rook's Rest, or when Hugh Hammer faced off with the giant dragon Vermithor. The latter of those events isn't described at all in the book, and the show really ran with it.

But at other times, it's resulted in some weird choices that feel contrary to the things Martin actually did tell us fairly explicitly about the characters. In the book, Daemon pretty swiftly displays why the Greens should fear him by proving time and again that he's one of the most seasoned battle commanders in Westeros, winning victory after victory across the Riverlands. The show instead had Daemon spend most of season 2 in Harrenhal, bungling one thing after another until he finally got his army together by the finale. Same with Alicent and Rhaenyra, who had a much more antagonistic relationship in the novel.

To me, it seems like House of the Dragon has taken this history book reasoning that was fairly sound at the start and run with it to such a degree that it's now turning into a completely different story than the one Martin told in Fire & Blood. But I digress...

What if people don't like the changes the show makes?

Condal also addressed the inevitable for whiners like me: what if people gripe about the changes the show made? "I think it's almost impossible to render a version of this show that...gives everybody what they want, all the time," he said. "I will say, television is a collaborative medium. It's not a single-media artform...it's a multimedia job. There are writers, directors, there are actors, there's art department, costume designers...there's the realities, realities of reality. Practicality, budget, what you can and cannot do with small children. All those things kind of come into play. And because of that, I don't even get what I want all the time."

I've highlighted that bit about what you can and cannot do with small children, because that feels pretty relevant to the fact that George R.R. Martin's post was all about Maelor, a small child who was cut out of the show. Obviously, this interview with Condal was recorded ahead of that post going up, but Martin mentioned how he'd spoken to Condal about Maelor on more than one occasion. That sort of pointed response backs up the idea that this interview was done, at least in part, as a response to Martin preparing to air out his grievances. At least that's how it reads to me; decide for yourself.

Ultimately, Condal can't let people being upset bother him; he still has a job to do, and that job is to make House of the Dragon. "I have to be able to live with, and go to lay my head on the pillow at night, with the decisions that I've made in the making of this show," he said. "Has everything come out exactly the way I wanted it to? No, of course not. Any showrunner that tells you that after the making of a second season of the show is probably not telling you the truth. Am I overall very proud of the thing that I've made? Yes. I think this is the proudest I've ever been of anything that I have done creatively."

"At the end, I think I always come back to where I started out at the beginning, which is I'm a massive fan of these books, I love this text very much, and I want to render as faithful an adaptation as possible for television, while making it broadly appealing and deeply interesting. And something that satisfies me, and satisfies other fans like me that, you know, weren't lucky enough to live this incredible dream of getting to bring to life this thing that I have loved for two decades plus."

- Ryan Condal

Ryan Condal: "Everything is made available" to George R.R. Martin

Condal also addressed the elephant in the room — whether that elephant happened to have already entered the room or not at the time of recording. The final question of the podcast was about how the showrunner works together with George R.R. Martin on House of the Dragon. Condal gave a fairly lengthy and straightforward response, so I'm just going to transcribe it all below:

"The writing that we do on the show is always available to him," Condal said. "I mean, I would say everything is made available to him, and I've always taken aboard his feedback wherever possible. There are, of course, places where we have not agreed, and departed. And some of those things are just things that are a specific condition of all the things I talked about in the making of the show. Telling a subjective story, not telling this objective history. We can't do 17 set pieces across the making of the show. We have to pick our spots. And the trick with this show is, when you go big, you have to go really big, but you can't go big everywhere. I think most of the differences have come in there."

"But I've always tried to take aboard the notes. I've always tried to pivot, and try to, you know, make the thing work. And does this help, or does this help? And sometimes, you know, at points, I think it works and connects, and other points, it doesn't. And I've accepted that. I've had to accept that as a condition of being a showrunner on a giant franchise."

"I always say, the job of showrunning is making a million decisions, and then a season of television appears at the end of it. And I have to make a million decisions. A lot of them I have to make very fast. And you have to make a decision, and then run with that decision, and accept that decision and how it affects all the other decisions that you're going to make. That is the condition of making TV. The act of doing a solo art form, like painting a painting or writing a book or even writing a comic book, these things are different and the demands of television are great and heavy. And sometimes it's beyond even the showrunner to be able to change the nature of a thing in order to jam it into place on TV. "

- Ryan Condal

"A lot of what my job is, is figuring out how to pivot and move and think laterally. And we can't do that thing, but we can do this thing or this thing because this...it's not a book, it's a television show."

I'm not going to lie, there are things in that response that rankle me a little. This has already gotten pretty long so I won't get into them here, aside from noting one thing: George R.R. Martin has a lot of experience working in television. I highly doubt he's not aware of the media's limitations and differences between books and television that Condal is alluding to here; in fact, he's talked about them in the past many times.

But that's just one writer's opinion. What do you make of all this? Was the Dance of the Dragons but a prelude to an even greater conflict, between author and television show? I hope not, but these are interesting times. Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

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