In August, HBO launches House of the Dragon. It's a prequel spin-off to the most successful TV show in the cable network's history and also a key moment for the network to see if the franchise has legs beyond the original series.
Game of Thrones - based on George R.R. Martin's novel series A Song of Ice and Fire - ran for eight seasons and 73 episodes, shot over a period of almost nine years. When it launched it was seen as a huge gamble for the cable giant, which had cut its teeth on prestigious dramas such as The Sopranos, The Wire and Deadwood. An out-and-out fantasy show, featuring dragons, magic and face-shifting assassins, was seen as an outlier. It wasn't entirely unprecedented - the gloriously trashy vampire drama True Blood had been a big hit since 2008 - but Thrones had a bigger budget and was a more challenging show to attract a mass audience.
As it turned out, HBO need not have been worried. The show broke records for HBO viewership, for DVD and Blu-Ray sales, for merchandising and for piracy. The books sold roughly 10 million copies a year every year the show was on air. It became the biggest water-cooler drama series since Lost, and arguably nothing has quite replaced it in the cultural conversation since it ended. It made stars of its castmembers and completely rewrote the rules on the level of production value viewers can now expect from their TV shows. It's arguably mainly down to Thrones that were are now seeing TV show budgets rising to over $15 million per episode, a figure unthinkable when it started (when Thrones's early episodes only cost $6 million per episode, and the average network US episode still cost $3 million or less).
And then it ended. And people had thoughts on how it ended. Lots of them.
Shows with controversial endings are nothing new. People still debate the merits (or the lack thereof) of the ending of shows like St. Elsewhere, The Prisoner, Lost and Battlestar Galactica many years and sometimes decades after they aired. But the visceral hatred of Game of Thrones's ending in some quarters was something else. It's now three years after the show ended, and the vehement dislike of the ending shows little sign of abating (at least online). The showrunner-writers David Benioff and D.B. Weiss have been widely criticised for rushing the end to the series in a perceived haste to move on to other projects for Disney and Netflix, whilst George R.R. Martin has been criticised for not delivering the final two novels to the book series in time for them to be adapted properly.
Whether these criticisms are fair or not is immaterial to how widespread they are, and the passion of viewers on the subject has created a key problem for HBO.
Whilst the final season of the show was in production, HBO embarked on an ambitious project to create a Game of Thrones "expanded universe," effectively mining Martin's work to create numerous TV shows (both live-action and animated) in the same setting. Numerous creative talents were brought on board to develop multiple projects simultaneously; at one point HBO were simultaneously juggling six pitches set in widely-varying timeframes in the history of Westeros and Essos (since then they have started developing several more projects). A pilot based on one idea, the origin story of the White Walkers, was greenlit and was in pre-production a year before the final episode of the mothership even aired.
After Thrones's controversial ending, HBO recalibrated. They decided not to proceed to series with The Longest Night (as the spin-off was reportedly going to be called, or at least that was Martin's preferred title) despite having spent almost $30 million on the pilot and reshoots, and instead commissioned a new idea from producer Ryan Condal: House of the Dragon. This new series would tell the story of the Dance of the Dragons, a bloody civil war in House Targaryen which took place almost 170 years before the events of Game of Thrones and explained how and why most of the house's dragons were wiped out.
The pivot was interesting, as it seemed HBO was following the popular narrative that viewers had responded badly to the ending of the White Walker storyline in Game of Thrones but approved of the dragons and the more grounded story of civil war in Westeros, against a backdrop of complex feudal machinations. The new series, they believe, will play to Game of Thrones's strengths whilst omitting what could be seen as its largest weaknesses. They've also cleverly kept many of the other spin-off possibilities in development without directly committing to any of them: if House of the Dragon bombs, then HBO might well give up on developing the universe any further and move on to fresher pastures. No pressure, then.
Still, HBO might have reasons for confidence. Since Game of Thrones aired, many other shows have come along to lift its crown as the top fantasy series and have fallen short. Shadow and Bone was good but low-key, The Witcher managed to annoy fans of both the books and video games despite plaudits for Henry Cavill in the title role, and The Wheel of Time's large deviations from the source material almost from the off made it a hard sell to book fans (show-first viewers were much more receptive). If you want (mostly) quality, live-action fantasy, then HBO has good form.
House of the Dragon also has the leg-up in promo material. The short teaser and various promo shots have attracted some commentary based on costumes and character appearances, but nothing like the howling mobs generated by its near-competitor, Amazon's Lord of the Rings spin-off The Rings of Power. The Rings of Power has already dropped a trailer that has attracted heavy criticism for its over-use of fake-looking CGI, the presence of characters and races in places they never were in the books, and its massive compression of thousands of years of detailed history into a single generation (to avoid time skips). House of the Dragon's early reception, at least so far (and before a trailer), has been more positive. It helps that HBO has been restrained in its hype-building, and House of the Dragon will also launch almost two weeks before The Rings of Power.
On top of that, thanks to the pandemic, HBO has seen huge numbers of people who missed the Game of Thrones bus first time around catching up via HBO Max in the USA (and streaming services like NowTV in the UK), and HBO seems very happy with how the show has done in streamings. Online commentators like to say that nobody has watched or talked about Game of Thrones since its ending, but that doesn't seem to be quite the case.
House of the Dragon has a top cast, solid writers, Thrones's best director as co-showrunner, completed source material (Martin's "fake history" book Fire and Blood) and HBO's impeccable production values. There is no reason for the show not to be good and not be a hit. If it is, then I suspect HBO will be mining the Game of Thrones toybox for more ideas for many years to come. If it isn't, then HBO might decide its dalliance with epic fantasy is over, and move on to other ideas and genres, which would be a shame.
We'll start get an inkling of which way it's going to go when House of the Dragon launches on 21 August.
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