House of the Dragon: Season 3

The civil war known as the Dance of the Dragons is in full force, with Rhaenyra Targaryen and Aegon II Targaryen pitted against one another with their armies and dragons. Aegon II is reportedly dead, though his body has not been found, and his brother and heir Aemond has gone to ground with his dragon Vhagar, the sole survivor of the three dragons that conquered the Seven Kingdoms. But Rhaenyra faces new challenges as a massive naval battle erupts and a substantial Hightower army advances from the south-west. With more claimants to the throne waiting and new dragon riders emerging, the war is about to get a lot messier.

House of the Dragons, Game of Thrones's spin-off prequel about how the Targaryens lost their dragons, has been a bit of a mixed bag so far. The first season was excellent, with impressive fidelity to the source material and Paddy Considine's phenomenal performance as King Viserys Targaryen anchoring a well-considered project, possibly the finest season in the franchise since Game of Thrones's mid-point. The second season was, in sharp contrast, an odd, dispirited convulsion of television that didn't seem to know what it wanted to do or how to execute it. The phenomenal Battle of Rook's Rest aside, it was a bizarre slide into mediocrity.

Season 3 comfortably splits the difference. More dynamic character arcs and two massive battle sequences (one at sea) give the season more verve and pace than the second season. Season 3 is also enhanced by the presence of James Norton as Ormund Hightower, a deliciously scheming performance that adds a lot of character to a minor role from the books. Freddie Fox was already a bit of a breath of fresh air as Ser Gwayne Hightower in Season 2, but here he is presented as the only sane man in the room as he has to traipse around half the continent with Criston Cole (a satisfyingly, increasingly unhinged performance by Fabien Frankel) proving that some people just succeed in life by failing upwards. These two actors do a lot to keep the story afloat during its more questionable moments, helped by Benjamin Evan Ainsworth giving a game performance as the young but wise-beyond-his-years Daeron Targaryen. Phia Saban, who has always been great as Helaena Targaryen, is particularly outstanding, elevated from a few lines in the source material to the damaged heart and soul of the green faction.

Elsewhere the cast is replete with fine actors given iffy scripts or not much to do. Olivia Cooke and Emma D'Arcy remain superb actors but here the writers seem at pains not to have them actually hate one another, and instead constantly come up with ways of getting them to hang out. At least that makes more sense this year than the previous season's "let's sneak into the enemy stronghold" mechanic. Matt Smith is also excellent as the rogue prince Daemon, an at-heart honourable man desperately trying to be bad but not quite pulling it off. Early Season 3 has him not doing much but later on he is finally given quality scripts to cut loose with, and as usual nails it. Fortunately, he doesn't spend half the season in a bizarre horror side-story in Harrenhal.

Unfortunately, Ewan Mitchell's Aemond does spend half the season in a bizarre horror side-story in Harrenhal that will cause screams of frustration from viewers. Stop benching your best characters in Harrenhal doing nothing! It also massively detracts from Harrenhal's reputation as a bleak and foreboding place. By the end of Season 3 it feels about as scary as the Addams Family mansion. Deep untold horrors from the pit in the kitchen again? Must be Tuesday.

Other storylines are a mixed bag. The newly-promoted "dragonseeds" have a lot of good plot material, but Sonoya Mizuno's Mysaria has nothing to do except give bad advice but inexplicably still be trusted. Replacing Nettles from the books with Rhaena Targaryen is one of those ideas that isn't completely bad (at least in terms of keeping the cast manageable) but in execution is half-hearted, though it does at least remind us that dragons are very dangerous creatures that can't always be controlled. The northern greybeards led by Roderick Dustin (Tommy Flanagan) are entertaining and fortunately are not overused, but characters like Alysanne Blackwood (Annie Shapero) feel like they've had 80% of their scenes cut as the camera dwells on them and you're trying to remember what they've done that warrants the attention.

Still, at least this time around the season storylines build satisfyingly to their climax at the Battle of Tumbleton, rather than being cut short and left to flap in the wind by a last-minute episode count cut as with Season 2. The shorter, eight-episode count for Season 3 helps provide it focus and cuts short some storylines that I suspect would have been interminable at ten episodes (particularly anything to do with Harrenhal, or more Criston Cole stomping around the woods looking vaguely constipated).

Season 3 of House of the Dragon (***½) improves on the second but doesn't rise to the heights of the first. It is certainly an entertaining season of television with lots of vfx eye candy, great performances and several satisfying storylines, but the show seems to still be rolling around with its safety wheels on, not letting things cut loose with how vicious and vengeance-driven the story in the books could be, and tying itself into pretzel-like knots to explain why it's holding back. Hopefully the show can deliver a stronger run of episodes for its fourth and final run.

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House of the Dragon: Season 2

King Viserys Targaryen has died. He left instructions for his oldest child, Princess Rhaenyra, to inherit the Iron Throne. But Ser Criston Cole, the Kingmaker, has instead crowned his son as Aegon II. The realm is divided with almost half declaring for the Queen on Dragonstone and almost half for Aegon. Banners have been summoned and armies are forming. But this war will be bloody, for both sides are armed with dragons. Some are trying to halt the bloodshed with a negotiation, but others are seeking to profit from the chaos as much as possible. The Dance of the Dragons has begun.

Game of Thrones was the biggest TV show of the 2010s and also, easily, the biggest live-action fantasy television series of all time. The show stumbled hard at the end, though, and left behind a bitter taste for viewers. When HBO announced a prequel spin-off, they knew they would have to work hard to win back the fans disappointed by how Game of Thrones ended.

Against the odds, they succeeded. The first season of House of the Dragon was well-characterised with some great dialogue, brief but impressive action sequences, and some outstanding performances, particularly Paddy Considine's epic turn as King Viserys and Matt Smith as his brother, Prince Daeron, as well as Milly Alcock and Emma D'Arcy as Rhaenyra and Emily Carey and Olivia Cooke as her rival, Alicent. This was all great stuff, and established House of the Dragon as the clear fantasy successor to Game of Thrones, succeeding where Wheel of Time, Rings of Power and The Witcher had, to one extent or another, failed.

The reason for the success appears reasonable: whilst Game of Thrones struggled when it outpaced the books and did not have access to George R.R. Martin's source material any more, House of the Dragon had its entire storyline mapped out in Martin's 2018 tome Fire & Blood, with character motivations and arcs clearly established, and major action setpieces established. With a great cast, some strong writers who'd already established themselves in the first season, and some superb vfx designers (the dragons remain unmatched on the small screen), there was no reason to expect Season 2 to be anything other than a smash hit success.

Which is why it's a bit of a mystery why the second season is such a bizarre mess. Season 2 certainly has some great character moments to match anything in Season 1, some superb action scenes, some phenomenal vfx etc, but the pacing of the season has been hugely thrown off. Much of the season feels sluggish, with too many scenes of characters sitting around talking about the plot (again) rather than getting on with business. There's also a bizarre reluctance to embrace the fact that the war has started and cannot be stopped: Season 1 ended in such a way that should have left nobody in doubt that a full-scale conflict could not be avoided. Season 2, however, spends almost its entire length re-litigating about whether the war is inevitable and maybe there's a way to avoid it etc, which beggars all belief. The writers also seem to have realised that, following the book, they'd never have a scene with Emma D'Arcy and Olivia Cooke verbally sparring ever again, so they introduce a surreal device where the two find ways to sneak into one another's strongholds for occasional hearts-to-hearts. It's genuinely bizarre and does not wreck a sense of disbelief as drive a four-ton truck right through the middle of it.

The writers also decided it was a great idea to have Matt Smith spend most of the season wandering around the "haunted" castle of Harrenhal having weird visions and strange exchanges with the locals. One episode of this might have been interesting, even fun, but when this extends into a third episode you might be wondering this was a good use of resources, such as one of your best and most expensive actors. There's also a bemusing obsession with trying to tie the events of House of the Dragon into those of Game of Thrones, through visions, dreams, prophecies, etc that just makes the show feel less confident in standing on its own two feet.

The season finally perks up with the fourth episode, where all hell breaks loose. The Battle of Rook's Rest is excellent, with a well-choreographed ground battle and a furious aerial engagement. Any fears that HBO's vfx department would not be able to deliver on the promise of dragon-on-dragon ultraviolence are laid to rest here. The battle and its plot ramifications are a major highlight of the season.

Any hope of the season turning the corner and becoming more compelling is quickly dispelled: Daemon continues to mess around at Harrenhal interminably, Rhaenyra and Alicent continue to come up with reasons not to, y'know, get on with the actual the war the story is about, and there's a whole lot of not very much going on . The season is not helped by the late HBO decision to reduce the episode count from ten to eight, with the writers' strike just starting. This meant that the production team couldn't do anything to compact the events into fewer episodes (usually ill-advised, but in this case it would have helped the season tremendously with pacing) and just had to cut off the final two scripts from the run and shunt them into Season 3 instead. This robs Season 2 of any kind of climax, it just stumbles to a halt.

There are other strengths to Season 2. Though he debuted at the end of Season 1 and showed some good promise, The Last Kingdom's Ewan Mitchell really nails the role of Prince Aemond and becomes a great addition to the show. Jefferson Hall's Tyland Lannister is also most entertaining and has more to do this season as a politician and diplomat. The acting throughout remains strong, even if the actors sometimes struggle to sell the more nonsensical plot twists.

Season 2 of House of the Dragon (***) is a deeply odd, dispirited convulsion of television. It retains many of the strengths of the first season, including great acting, vfx and casting, but the pacing and writing are all over the place. There's a lack of firm commitment to the fact this is a war, and despite the source material being complete and eminently filmable, there's a strange tendency to drift away from it at times in favour of contrived, less interesting "TV drama" moments. Game of Thrones and House are both at their very best when they resist being "ordinary TV" and it's odd this season makes such strides to try to become that. The battle sequence in the fourth episode is a huge highlight, though, and hopefully now all this additional scene-setting has been done, Season 3 can just cut loose with business and get the story going at last.

The season is available to watch on HBO and Max (and local equivalents) in much of the world, and Sky Atlantic and Now TV in the UK, alongside physical media releases. A third season of House of the Dragon is currently in production for release in late 2026.

Thank you for reading The Wertzone. To help me provide better content, pleae consider contributing to my Patreon page and other funding methods.

HOUSE OF THE DRAGON and RINGS OF POWER both get second season trailers

HBO and Amazon have dropped the trailers for their forthcoming sophomore seasons of their big fantasy shows at the same time.

Amazon opened proceedings by deploying Hot Elf Sauron:

The first season of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power can be best-summed as "okay but disappointing." Lots of potential, but mostly unrealised in the final product with some very strange plotting undercutting a killer premise and an apparent lack of trust in Tolkien's original story and timeline that makes you wonder why they bothered in the first place. Still, this might be worth watching for the insane Clark Kentness of nobody recognising Sauron because he's wearing a nice wig.

The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power Season 2 hits Amazon on 29 August.

Not to be outdone, HBO dropped the trailer for their second season of Targaryen Royal Rumble a few hours later:

HBO know what their audience likes here: dragons, armies marching, some nice scenery and even some Stark teasing. Nice.

House of the Dragon Season 2 rolls onto the battlefield on 16 June.

HBO casts Dunk & Egg for A KNIGHT OF THE SEVEN KINGDOMS: THE HEDGE KNIGHT

HBO has announced that it has found the leads for its upcoming Game of Thrones spin-off series, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms: The Hedge Knight. The show takes place about seventy years after the events of House of the Dragon and ninety years before Game of Thrones itself, and offers a more ground-level look at the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros during a time of (relative) peace.

Irish actor Peter Claffey will play the role of Ser Duncan the Tall, popularly known as Dunk. Claffey is a relative newcomer, picking up guest spots on Harry Wild and Bad Sisters before winning a lead role as Cormac Kelly on Wreck. He also had roles on Emmerdale and the film The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes. Before that he played professional rugby for Connacht. 

Ser Duncan the Tall is a hedge knight, an honourable and dedicated warrior but who comes from poor beginnings and does not have the wealth, status and privilege that the sons of lords have. Taking up the mantle of a knight after the death of his master, Ser Duncan sets out to win renown at the great tourney of Ashford Meadow, only to inadvertently start mixing with some of the greatest figures in the realm.

At eight years old, Dexter Soll Ansell is even more of a newcomer, having also appeared in The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes alongside The Midwich Cuckoos and Christmas on Mistletoe Farm.

Ansell will play Egg, a young runaway boy that Dunk meets on the road who wants to become a squire. Egg joins Dunk in his misadventures, despite Dunk's misgivings.

George R.R. Martin has written three novellas about Dunk & Egg, namely The Hedge Knight (1998), The Sworn Sword (2002) and The Mystery Knight (2010). He has also partially written a fourth story, The She-Wolves (not the final title), and planned out a fifth, The Village Hero. The three completed stories are available in an omnibus version, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms.

Unlike the grand epic events of the novel series A Song of Ice and Fire (adapted to television as Game of Thrones), the Dunk & Egg stories are set in a period of (relative) peace in the Seven Kingdoms, with King Daeron II Targaryen, "The Good," repairing the damages caused by the brief civil war known as the Blackfyre Rebellion and the entry of Dorne into the realm through marriage. Dunk & Egg's adventures bring them to the notice of the powerful, who are not above using a mere hedge knight and his squire for their own ends, even in the back roads of the Seven Kingdoms. 

Ira Parker is the head writer and showrunner for the project, which was greenlit last year. George R.R. Martin will act as a producer and consultant, as will House of the Dragon head honcho Ryan Condal. The show is expected to film this summer for a 2025 debut on HBO.

Several additional Game of Thrones-related projects are in development as animated series or further live-action shows, although HBO seems to have taken its foot off the throttle regarding the number of projects in development. House of the Dragon Season 2 is currently due to debut on 16 June this year.

HOUSE OF THE DRAGON Season 2 trailer released

HBO have released the first teaser trailer for the second season of House of the Dragon, it's Game of Thrones spin-off/prequel show.

The second season of the show depicts the beginning of the Dance of the Dragons, the bloody civil war between two branches of House Targaryen after the death of the well-meaning King Viserys II.

The second season of House of the Dragon debuts in the summer of 2024.

HOUSE OF THE DRAGON to get shorter seasons moving forwards

HBO will give Game of Thrones spin-off/prequel series House of the Dragon shorter season orders moving forwards.

HBO renewed House for a second year just after the launch of the show last summer, which saw it become HBO's biggest-ever, first-run drama. However, no episode count was given at the time. It's now being reported that the original plan was for a 10-episode run like the first season, but this has now been downgraded to 8 episodes.

According to HBO, the move was "story-driven," but there are indications that this is part of a cost-cutting drive across all Warner Brothers-related companies following their recent merger with Discovery (which has led to the gutting of content for the HBO Max streaming service). It will certainly disappoint fans already facing a two-year wait for the second season, whilst executive producer and creator of the source material George R.R. Martin had previously praised HBO for sticking with 10 episodes a year as other streamers ruthlessly moved to 8 or even 6 episodes per season.

However, the silver lining is that HBO may give an early third season order for the show, allowing it to flow from work on Season 2 straight into Season 3, in a bid to reduce the gap between the two seasons. Season 2 had a number of late script rewrites (partially a result of the episode compression) and will only start filming in the next few weeks, over two years after shooting on Season 1 began.

The length of modern TV seasons has proven a thorny issue, with fans increasingly irate at waiting multiple years for a very short run of episodes, whilst increased production costs and a shortage of vfx studio capacity encouraging streamers and cable companies to look at shorter runs with more of a focus on quality. But with quality also being criticised for many productions, and the shorter (and thus less-well-paid) working periods forcing writers and even showrunners to split their attention between multiple projects simultaneously, it appears this move is not working for everyone.

Some venues are now experimenting with a return to longer runs. Andor on Disney+ was recently praised for its 12-episode first season (divided into several shorter arcs) and the upcoming Daredevil: Born Again show will consist of a remarkable 18 episodes.

House of the Dragon: Season 1

The Old King, Jaehaerys Targaryen, dies with no clear line of succession. At a Great Council, the realm chooses Prince Viserys as his successor, despite the superior blood-claim of Princess Rhaenys, establishing a precedent that a man's claim to the Iron Throne will always outclass that of a woman. Many years later, Viserys' wife dies in childbirth and he names his daughter and only child, Rhaenyra as his own heir. But when Viserys marries again and sires several sons, the precedent that he benefited from sets Westeros on a course for a deadly clash.

HBO's Game of Thrones, based on George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire epic fantasy series, was the most successful, most talked-about television show of the 2010s. The disappointing finale aside, the show reset expectations for the scale of stories that could be told on the small screen and single-handedly turned adult, live-action fantasy into a viable television genre. Many fantasy shows have come along since seeking to pick up where it left off, such as The Witcher, The Wheel of Time and, most recently, Amazon's Rings of Power. But HBO itself has now rejoined the fray with a direct spin-off, a prequel set almost 200 years before the events of Game of Thrones and charting the division of the Targaryen dynasty.

Perhaps frustratingly for all those other claimants to the fantasy crown, House of the Dragon emerges as the clear successor to Game of Thrones in overall quality. Despite the near-total absence of any of the same creative team from Game of Thrones, House of the Dragon arrives on screen with formidable verve and gravitas. It has the confidence to deal out its storytelling in measured doses, long scenes devoted to characterisation and relationships punctuated by swift bursts of action, dragonfire and violence. The show channels some of the same energy HBO's other great political drama, Succession, as a story of familial drama with vast-ranging consequences, a huge scope examined through a small lens. This gives Dragon some benefits even over its mothership series, with much less rapid transitioning between events separated by thousands of miles, allowing the show to delve deeper into the characters and their motivations.

Dragon still doesn't make things too easy for itself. The first season spans almost three decades, with several shifts in the cast. There's a lot of similar-looking characters with similar-sounding names, many coming complete with their own dragon (some of whom change owners as the story continues). If Game of Thrones had a sin of sometimes shying away from complexity and streamlining A Song of Ice and Fire's scope into something less ambitious, combining characters and (often pointlessly) renaming those with even vaguely similar names, House of the Dragon goes in the other direction, trusting the viewers will follow it along. This stands in especially harsh contrast to The Rings of Power, where at almost every turn the writers instead chose to simplify and streamline things, constantly underestimating the both the intelligence of the viewer and the richness of Tolkien's source material. 

Where Dragon overcomes potential hurdles is its constant reframing of the story on the relationship between Rhaenyra Targaryen and Alicent Hightower. Childhood friends and contemporaries (in a shift from the source material, where Alicent is older and more ambitious from the off), the two enjoy a strong camaraderie that is upset by politics, especially the yearning ambition of Alicent's father, Otto, Hand of the King. From the perspective of each, both Rhaenyra and Alicent have excellent reasons and sympathetic motivations for much of their actions. Rhaenyra is foolish in having children with something other than her husband, but she is also put in a difficult position by his inability to have children with her. Viserys often makes weak decisions to appease those around him, but he both has an aversion to bloodshed (not necessarily a bad thing) and a deep-seated belief that House Targaryen must marshal its strength against other, greater threats. Even the central argument over whether a woman should sit the Iron Throne delves into the idea of idealism versus pragmatism, what should be conflicting with what actually is.

The casting is exemplary. Paddy Considine plays King Viserys as a peacemaker and a family man who is never happier when sharing good news with his closest friends and family. Realpolitik and discussions of war anger him. Considine is already one of Britain's finest actors and House of the Dragon has finally given him the international awareness of that; his final scenes in the season should ensure him an Emmy nomination, at the very least, next year.

Similarly, Matt Smith shakes off the last vestiges of being Doctor Who to give a performance mixing anger, edgy violence and a yearning for acceptance as Prince Daemon, Viserys' younger, more reckless brother whom everyone fears will plunge the realm into war, but grows over the season into something of a more responsible figure. Smith had already made a great career pulling away from his early signature role and House of the Dragon solidifies his reputation.

Other seasoned hands get some great moments in the sun: Rhys Ifans is excellent as Otto Hightower, giving a human edge to his character's grasping ambition. Steve Toussaint brings a mixture of pride, dignity and passion as Lord Corlys Velaryon, the Sea Snake. Eve Best is outrageously good as Rhaenys, the Queen Who Never Was, whose historical anger at her own usurping brings an interesting perspective to the current crisis.

The focus of the season is definitely on the two central characters of Rhaenyra and Alicent. Milly Alcock and Emily Carey play the young Rhaenyra and Alicent (in the first five episodes) with a mixture of energy and responsibility. Emma D'Arcy and Olivia Cooke play their adult incarnations (in the latter five episodes) with more nuance and cynicism, but channelling their younger counterparts' mannerisms and expressions in an impressive way.

Production-wise the show is also outstanding. Impressive sets and excellent costumes abound, and the CG is superb, especially anything involving the dragons. The show does make liberal use of video walls (similar to those used on The Mandalorian) and, like a lot of other modern fantasy shows, it sometimes feels a bit unnecessarily fake when real locations are substituted for CGI backdrops that can't help but feel sterile and unconvincing. Dragon goes a step further by faking some of the exact same places that were shot on location in Thrones (most notably the Dragonstone causeway), which makes the fakery even more obvious. However, Dragon does, for the most part, avoid the awful, plastic-looking CGI that blights a lot of modern genre productions, usually with much better use of lighting. Unfortunately Dragon does have a lot of murky night-time scenes and these are almost as badly-lit as the final season of Game of Thrones, with important scenes vanishing in a murky grey soup.

House of the Dragon is not flawless and does make some odd choices, and some outright (but certainly not fatal) stumbles. Several times the show unleashes "rule of cool" nonsense, things that look really spectacular but don't make any sense if you spend five seconds thinking about them: a Kingsguard brutally murdering a guy in front of a room full of witnesses and suffers no consequences; a dragon smashes through a building and kills dozens of civilians and nobody gives a toss; a character throws away a moment where they could end a conflict before it even starts with a minimum of bloodshed (although they later give some semi-reasonable justifications for it); Daemon runs through a storm of arrows and single-handedly fights off dozens of men in a highly improbable manner. In these moments the show teeters on the edge of Game of Thrones Season 7 and 8 silliness, but it always manages to pull itself back from the abyss with its character-focused and character-based dramatic scenes, which is where the meat of the story is.

Season 1 of House of the Dragon (****) is the finest slice of the Thrones franchise since at least the fourth season of the original series, and certainly the finest slice of live-action, epic fantasy TV to air since then as well (despite some other showings bringing much more money to the table). It's character-focused story mixes family and political drama to great effect, with outstanding vfx set pieces and uniformly excellent performances. Occasional jarring jumps in the timeline and events that visually impress but don't make sense logically threaten to undo the good work being done elsewhere, but ultimately the season is a great piece of television fantasy and drama.

The season is available to watch on HBO and HBO Max (and local equivalents) in much of the world, and Sky Atlantic and Now TV in the UK.

Thank you for reading The Wertzone. To help me provide better content, please consider contributing to my Patreon page and other funding methods.

Miguel Sapochnik stepping down as HOUSE OF THE DRAGON co-showrunner

In somewhat surprising news, House of the Dragon's co-showrunner Miguel Sapochnik is stepping down from his role on the show. His colleague Ryan Condal will serve as the show's only showrunner moving forwards. However, Game of Thrones veteran Alan Taylor is joining the project as a director and executive producer in Season 2.

According to Sapochnik, he made the decision having spent three years working hard on the project, bringing it to the screen and making it a success. With the show's success assured - the show has seen its audience grow across its first two episodes and has already been renewed for a second season - he has decided to move on.

Taylor is a veteran of numerous TV shows, including Lost, The West Wing and Mad Men, as well as a HBO veteran who has worked on Six Feet Under, Sex and the City, Rome, Carnivale, Big Love, The Sopranos, Boardwalk Empire, and Deadwood. He also directed the Sopranos spin-off film The Many Saints of Newark, and the MCU movie Thor: The Dark World. He directed seven episodes of Game of Thrones across its first, second and seventh seasons. He has won one Emmy Award for his directing and been nominated for two more.

House of the Dragon is currently airing its first season, with the third episode (of ten) due to arrive this Sunday. The series is expected to shoot its second season next year before returning to the screens in 2024.

HOUSE OF THE DRAGON renewed for Season 2

In unsurprising news, HBO has renewed House of the Dragon for a second season. The news comes after the debut episode of the series scored 10 million viewers in the USA, making it HBO's biggest-ever premiere event. This is fully five times the audience that parent show Game of Thrones itself achieved back in 2011.

In the week since the show premiered, HBO have reported that the audience has doubled across repeat broadcasts, legal downloads and streaming via HBO Max, effectively bringing total viewership to not far off what Game of Thrones was achieving when it went off-air in 2019.

Season 2 of House of the Dragon is likely to start shooting early next year in the UK, for a likely early 2024 premiere on HBO. House of the Dragon is employing massive amounts of vfx and post-production which will likely prevent it from airing annually, as Game of Thrones managed to do for most of its run. However, House of the Dragon is envisaged as around a three-season project adapting just a few chapters from George R.R. Martin's book Fire & Blood. HBO has not ruled out developing House of the Dragon into a sort-of anthology series which could then jump back or forwards in time to another point in Targaryen history.

The news is also likely positive for the numerous other Game of Thrones spin-off shows currently in development. At the moment HBO is actively developing The Tales of Dunk & Egg with writer Steven Conrad, The Nine Voyages of the Sea Snake with Bruno Heller, The Ten Thousand Ships with Amanda Segel, Snow with producer-actor Kit Harington, and an animated show set in the Golden Empire of Yi Ti, but has not yet greenlit any of them.

Amazon are readying their own fantasy epic, The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, to launch next Friday, whilst Netflix's The Sandman has enjoyed massive success, but apparently won't get a renewal decision for a few more weeks due to the show's high cost.

HBO releases full trailer for HOUSE OF THE DRAGON

HBO has unveiled its first full trailer for House of the Dragon.

Soundtracked by a cool cover version of "Venus in Furs" by the Velvet Underground, the trailer opens with King Viserys Targaryen (Paddy Considine) expanding on a dream he's had.

Viserys: "The dream was clearer than a memory, and I heard the sound of thundering hooves, splintering shields and ringing swords. And I placed upon the Iron Throne, and all the dragons roared as one."

We cut to an image of a dragonrider flying high over the city of King's Landing, with the great Dragonpit (the home of House Targaryen's dragons in this time period) in the background.

Over scenes of everyday life in King's Landing and the meeting of the small council, we hear conversation between Otto Hightower (Rhys Ifans), the Hand of the King, and the other King's advisors, including Lyonel Strong (Gavin Spokes), master of laws, and Corlys Velaryon (Steve Toussaint), master of ships.

Otto Hightower: "I consider the matter urgent, that of your succession"

Lyonel Strong: "Who else would have a claim?"

Otto Hightower: "The firstborn child."

Lyonel Strong: "Rhaenyra? No queen has ever sat the Iron Throne."

Corlys Velaryon: "The king has an heir: Daemon Targaryen."

Viserys: "I will not be made to choose between my brother and my daughter."

We see Prince Daemon Targaryen (Matt Smith) competing in a joust and Princess Rhaenyra (Milly Alcock) walking along a beach with Laenor Velaryon (Theo Nate). We then see Prince Daemon accepting the salute of the City Watch of King's Landing, followed by Rhaenyra and Ser Harrold Westerling, Lord Commander of the Kingsguard (Graham McTavish), greeting Ser Criston Cole (Fabien Frankel), another member of the order.

We then see Princess Rhaenys Velaryon (Eve Best), the wife of Lord Corlys, consulting with her husband.

Rhaenys: "Rhaenyra's succession will be challenged. Knives will come out."

Daemon Targaryen approaches his brother on the Iron Throne but is stopped by the Kingsguard at swordpoint. This is followed by Alicent Hightower (Emily Carey) talking with King Viserys about his duty.

Alicent: "You are the king. Your duty is to take a new wife."

Viserys and Daemon then meet. Daemon is clearly unhappy.

Viserys: "I have decided to name a new heir."

Daemon: "I am your heir."

The various factions then meet on the island of Dragonstone, where a furious Daemon draws his sword on the King's Hand.

Laenor Velaryon: "War is afoot."

Rhaenyra then asks Ser Criston Cole a hard question and gets even harder answers from Rhaenys.

Rhaenyra: "Do you think the realm will ever accept me as their queen?"

Rhaenys: "A woman would not inherit the Iron Throne, because that is the order of things."

Rhenyra: "When I am queen I will create a new order."

The story then shifts forwards in time some years, when both Rhaenyra and Alicent are older (now played by Emma D'Arcy and Olivia Cooke) and events have moved on.

Reggio Haratis: "Your family has dragons."

Viserys: "They're a power man should never have trifled with."

No idea on who Reggio Haratis is, but he sounds like an Essosi. More scenes of battle and the aftermath of battle, possibly the war against pirates in the Stepstones where Corlys and Daemon distinguished themselves. We also see Daemon with his dragon, Caraxes the Blood Wyrm. 

Alicent: "If Rhaenyra comes into power, she can cut off any challenge to her succession."

Rhaenyra: "If I am to inherit the Iron Throne, she will block my way."

Both Alicent and Rhaenyra now have children, so the stakes for the succession of the Iron Throne have grown stronger. Aemond Targaryen (Ewan Mitchell), Alicent's second son, is seen in (mock?) combat with Ser Criston Cole.

Otto: "Our hearts remain as one."

Alicent: "Our hearts were never one."

We see a shift from the young Alicent and Rhaenyra as close childhood friends to adults separated by power and ambition, as well as more scenes of battles in the Stepstones, with Lord Corlys in the thick of the action.

Rhaenys (to Alicent): "Have you never imagined yourself on the Iron Throne?"

We see more dragons flying over Dragonstone, people in King's Landing, the Velaryons arriving in the throne room, more scenes of the aftermath of battle, dragons roasting people alive and Alicent threatening Rhaenyra with a dagger.

Alicent: "Where is duty? Where is sacrifice?"

Rhaenyra: "Now they see you as you are."

The trailer closes with a shot of a single dragon.

In a new article at The Hollywood Reporter today, HBO also confirms that the time-jump in Season 1 will take place roughly halfway through its first ten-episode season, and they are currently envisaging a 3-4 season run for the show with the possibility of moving to a new time period once the Dance of Dragons has been covered.

House of the Dragon launches on 21 August on HBO.

HBO dishes the dirt on GAME OF THRONES spin-off ideas

In a wide-ranging article at The Hollywood Reporter, insiders at HBO have spoken for the first time about the various attempts to bring a Game of Thrones spin-off to the table.

HBO reached a deal with Game of Thrones showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss in 2016 to end the show after eight seasons. Almost immediately HBO began exploring ideas for a spin-off, with an eagerness that surprised industry watchers.

HBO had never made a spin-off show to any of their series before. The closest they had come was around 2005 when a spin-off from The Wire, provisionally called The Hall and revolving around the character of Tommy Carcetti as he became Mayor of Baltimore, had gotten quite far into development before it was canned, and the resulting work was folded into the political storyline in Seasons 4 and 5 of the main show. A few years later HBO bought the rights to remake the BBC TV series I, Claudius and investigated turning it into a spin-off/sequel to its underrated historical drama, Rome, even using the same sets (which were, and still are, standing in a film studio outside Rome) and a similar format. HBO eventually broke their rule by producing two movie extensions to two of their most acclaimed series, Deadwood: The Movie (2019) and The Sopranos: The Many Saints of Newark (2021), but only after the Game of Thrones spin-off train had started moving.

George R.R. Martin himself came up with two ideas: The Tales of Dunk & Egg, based on his novellas about Ser Duncan the Tall and his squire, Egg, as they wandered the Seven Kingdoms about ninety years before the events of the main series. The novellas mix large-scale politics with much smaller-scale, "slice of life" adventure stories. Martin felt the juxtaposition with the vast scale and epic events of Game of Thrones was interesting. HBO agreed, but also felt that maybe adapting those novellas was aiming too small. Martin's other proposal was for a series called The Dance of the Dragons, about a civil war between two branches of the Targaryens when both sides were equipped with dragons. HBO liked that idea better, but felt conversely it was too similar to Game of Thrones itself. HBO, awkwardly, wanted something that captured the epic scale and politics of the original but was not so obviously related to it.

A number of other ideas were discussed, some of them pretty frivolous. One idea about a team of early heroes, including a warrior, a smith, a crone etc, who become the inspiration for the gods of the Seven Kingdoms was shot down pretty quickly. Other proposals were made, including (according to other rumours) for potential sequels to the main series revolving around popular characters, but Martin seemed largely unenthused by any ideas about sequels and these ideas were also limited by actor availability: many of the actors from Thrones, despite loving it, were only too happy to leave the brutal filming schedule behind to pursue other projects.

HBO eventually narrowed things down to five ideas: The Dance of the Dragons, with Carly Wray attached to write; a show about the Doom of Valyria with the alleged title Empire of Ash from Max Borenstein; a show about the warrior-queen Nymeria from Brian Helgeland; a show about the Long Night from Jane Goldman; and a series about Aegon the Conqueror from Rand Ravich and Far Shariat which would have revealed Aegon as a drunken lout (!).

During this development process Carly Wray decided not to pursue the Dance project, apparently feeling she wanted the series to start with the war kicking off whilst Martin wanted a slow-burn opening much like Thrones, with at least a full season preceding the start of the conflict. Bryan Cogman, who had penned some of Thrones' best-received episodes, was brought in to develop the idea further. However, HBO eventually put all of these other projects on hold to pursue the one that stood out to them: the Long Night project.

The show never had a final title, although The Longest Night was Martin's preferred one. Set five thousand years before the main series, the show would have expanded on the creation of the White Walkers and the advent of the Long Night, a generation-lasting winter in which Westeros was almost destroyed by hordes of undead invading from the far north. During this time Westeros is a patchwork quilt of primitive, Bronze Age-esque kingdoms, some so small you could ride across them in a day, and ill-prepared to withstand such an invasion. The show would have had to create human drama out of characters and ideas from the novels which are larger-than-life legends, like Lann the Clever and Bran the Builder.

HBO gave a pilot order and spent a reported $30-35 million on building sets and hiring a cast led by Naomi Watts and John Simm. The pilot episode, entitled Bloodmoon, was shot but HBO started having second thoughts. There'd been a change in leadership at the company and The Longest Night was seen as a gamble, being very different in tone and atmosphere to Thrones. There were also no dragons, and the epic scale may have been somewhat lost with smaller kingdoms and more primitive castles and towns. The Children of the Forest would also be major, ongoing characters, but they had made relatively little impact on the original show. Martin himself also seemed unsure about the project, as he had relatively little background material or notes about this period of Westerosi history, and was not able to readily or quickly answer lore questions from the writers.

More significant, although nobody at HBO has ever said this, is that the final season of Game of Thrones aired around this time and attracted controversial opinions about its ending. Although many aspects of the final season were criticised, the way the White Walkers were very quickly defeated in a single episode was particularly savaged by both fans and critics. Suddenly basing an entire series around the rise of the White Walkers and in which they were primary antagonists didn't seem like a great idea any more.

The Longest Night was cancelled, apparently a huge shock to the creative team who'd felt so confident about the project that they'd been already re-editing the pilot based on feedback and had started breaking the first season.

Almost immediately after this decision was made, HBO decided to go back to basics. They tapped Martin again and agreed that the Dance of Dragons project seemed like a better idea. Martin had already expanded his history of the Dance as part of an entire book about the Targaryens, Fire and Blood, which meant the production team would have hundreds of pages of source material to drawn upon. The dragons and the civil war in Westeros parts of Game of Thrones had been well-received, so doubling down on those elements seemed obvious. HBO and Martin were also able to quickly assemble a creative team who had their full confidence (Bryan Cogman having moved onto a deal at Amazon, acting as a creative consultant on their Lord of the Rings show before developing an original project). Ryan Condal, a friend of Martin's for around a decade and a proven showrunner from Colony (as well as getting a good rep for a Conan the Barbarian proposal he'd been shopping at Amazon), was tapped to develop the project whilst Game of Thrones super-director Miguel Sapochnik was also hired to work on the show (getting Sapochnik again was seen as a coup, as his work on Thrones had made him a hot property and he'd been somewhat reluctant to return).

Since House of the Dragon entered pre-production, HBO has gotten back into the Westeros business in a big way. They are now developing multiple new spin-off projects, including:

• A fresh take on The Tales of Dunk and Egg from The Secret Life of Walter Mitty writer Steven Conrad.
• A show about Corlys Velaryon, the Sea Snake, with the working title The Nine Voyages of the Sea Snake. A major character in House of the Dragon (played by Steven Toussaint), this show would depict him as a young man when he embarked on nine "great voyages" to remote corners of the world, including Qarth, fabled Asshai and the Thousand Islands. Rome writer-producer Bruno Heller is still developing this idea.
•  A show called The Ten Thousand Ships, revolving around Princess Nymeria of Ny Sar, a princess of the Rhoyner who leads her people to safety when her country is destroyed the Valyrians. Their fleet of ships flees across the Summer Sea in search of safety, addressing issues of food, water and internal politics whilst searching for a new home. Think of a fantasy version of Battlestar Galactica. Person of Interest writer Amanda Segel is currently developing this project.
• An animated show set in the Golden Empire of Yi Ti.
• A sequel to Game of Thrones revolving around the character of Jon Snow. Actor Kit Harington himself proposed the idea to HBO and Martin, getting them intrigued enough to put the project into development under the very working title Snow.

In addition to these, HBO also mulled over an idea called Flea Bottom, a peasant's eye view of great events from the poor quarter of King's Landing, possibly an expansion of an idea Martin himself mentioned several times called Spear Carriers, which would have adopted an alternative Rosencrantz and Guildenstern-style perspective of major events from minor POV characters. These ideas are currently on hold.

A lot is riding on the success of House of the Dragon, but it has assembled a top cast and crew and the project has Martin's approval. HBO may also be buoyed that despite repeated attempts by rivals, no true successor to Game of Thrones has emerged (Netflix's The Witcher may have come closest) in popular media. And it will be interesting to see if any of the other spin-off ideas make it to the screen.

HBO unveils first trailer for HOUSE OF THE DRAGON

HBO has released the first trailer for its upcoming Game of Thrones spin-off/prequel series, House of the Dragon.

Beginning almost 200 years before the events of Game of Thrones, House of the Dragon charts a period of history in Westeros which at first glance seems prosperous and peaceful. However, disputes over the succession, driven by anger that the king's heir is a woman, drive the realm into two armed camps, with the threat of civil war looming. At this time in history, House Targaryen has almost twenty dragons at its service, with the dragonriders divided between the two factions, threatening a war that could be more destructive than anything seen previously.

The trailer starts with Rhaenyra Targaryen (Emma D'Arcy) gazing out to sea, possibly from the coast of the island of Dragonstone. We then see Prince Daemon Targaryen (Matt Smith) and his associate Mysaria (Sonoya Mizuno) in front of Dragonstone castle, with Daemon bearing a dragon's egg. He confronts the King's Hand, Lord Otto Hightower (Rhys Ifans). A voiceover asks, "What is this brief mortal life if not the pursuit of legacy?"

We then go back in time, quite a bit. We see a dragon and rider flying over the Red Keep in King's Landing as King Viserys I Targaryen (Paddy Considine) summons a council of the realm's greatest nobles to declare their loyalty to him and his anointed heir, Rhaenyra (now played as a young girl by Milly Alcock). Rickard Stark, Corlys Velaryon (Steve Toussaint) and Boremund Baratheon all swear fealty. The king's brother, Prince Daemon, is clearly angry and upset by this move. The king's cousin, Princess Rhaenys Velaryon (Eve Best), tells Rhaenyra that men would sooner put the realm to the torch than see a woman sit the Iron Throne.

We then see Rhaenyra considering the Painted Table in Dragonstone (the one Stannis spent much time pondering over in the original series), a great gathering in the ruins of Harrenhal and tribute being brought. Alicent Hightower (Olivia Cooke) is brought before the king in the Red Keep whilst a dragon's egg is burned and is told by her father Otto, "We play an ugly game, you have the determination to win it." Members of House Velaryon arrive in the Red Keep where a celebration is being held, and then a funeral is held, possibly at the Velaryon stronghold of High Tide. We then see the older Rhaenyra wearing red and looking determined, whilst Alicent and Ser Crison Cole (Fabien Frankel). We then see a man being dragged before the Iron Throne (possibly Daemon) and a shot of a Kingsguard beating someone. We see Daemon and Rhaenyra facing one another and engaging in a ceremony involving the shedding of blood whilst Lord Otto watches on. Prince Daemon and his men draw swords, whilst Alicent appears to try to stab Rhaenyra with a dagger. We are then told in voiceover, "History does not remember blood, it remembers names" whilst Prince Daemon confronts a dragon.

Over this the music plays, which seems to be mostly new materials but incorporates elements of Game of Thrones' theme at the end.

Game of Thrones: House of the Dragon, on which a lot is riding, debuts on HBO on 21 August this year.

Fire and Blood Money: Why a lot is riding on HBO's HOUSE OF THE DRAGON

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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HOUSE OF THE DRAGON to hit the airwaves on 21 August

HBO have confirmed that their Game of Thrones prequel/spin-off series House of the Dragon will arrive on screens on 21 August this year.

They also released a number of publicity photographs for the upcoming show.

Olivia Cooke as Lady Alicent Hightower. The daughter of the King's Hand, Lord Otto Hightower of Oldtown, and an ambitious would-be player in the game of thrones.

Steve Toussaint as Lord Corlys Velaryon of Driftmark and Eve Best as his wife, Princess Rhaenys Velaryon. Rhaenys was once a potential heir to the Iron Throne but was passed over in favour of her cousin Viserys, something that still irks her. Lord Corlys, famed as the "Sea Snake," is the most accomplished sailor in the history of Westeros, having sailed to distant, enigmatic Asshai-by-the-Shadow, into the far north of Westeros and across the top of Essos. A proud and rich man whose wealth rivals or exceeds that of the Lannisters. Princess Rhaenys rides the mighty dragon known as Meleys, the Red Queen.

Fabien Frankel as Ser Criston Cole. A skilled swordsman from Blackhaven in the Dornish Marches, his rude birth precludes high status. His formidable talent for battle sees him set his sights on a lofty goal.

Matt Smith as Prince Daemon Targaryen. The younger brother of King Viserys, he is everything his brother is not: short-tempered, passionate, fiery and often uncaring of the consequences. He chafes at his brother's limitations and yearns to prove himself in battle. He rides the formidable dragon Caraxes.

Rhys Ifans as Lord Otto Hightower of Oldtown. The ruler of the continent's second-largest city and a rich, influential ruler in his own right, Lord Otto has risen to the rank of the King's Hand, ruling the Seven Kingdoms in the king's name. A proud and ambitious man who sees the potential for dispute in the succession, and wishes to take advantage of the situation for his own ends.

Emma D'Arcy as Princess Rhaenyra Targaryen. Once called "the Realm's delight," the only child of King Viserys expects to inherit the Iron Throne, despite vehement opposition by those who believe that only a man can rule Westeros. Rhaenyra's iron will and ambition is not used to opposition. Her dragon is called Syrax.

Paddy Considine as King Viserys I Targaryen. The fifth king of the Targaryen dynasty, who inherited the throne from his grandfather. Like his grandfather, he is amiable and dedicated to peace. Unlike his grandfather, he is not used to making hard decisions to ensure peace and prosperity into the future, and his gentle nature is arguably building up greater trouble for later on. A good man but, perhaps, not a good king. He once rode Balerion the Black Dread, the steed of Aegon the Conqueror, but after Balerion died he never took another mount.

Milly Alcock and Emily Carey as the young Rhaenyra and Alicent, childhood friends whose paths in adulthood take them in a very different direction.

Sonoya Mizuno as Mysaria, a dancer from Essos who rises from obscurity to become a trusted ally of Prince Daemon Targaryen.

House of the Dragon begins almost 200 years before the events of Game of Thrones. House Targaryen rules the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros. Peace and prosperity fill the realm, the result of the rule of the wise Old King Jaehaerys the Conciliator. His grandson and successor, Viserys I, is an amiable and pleasant king, but lacks his gift for hard politicking that kept the peace. The lack of a male heir encourages competition for the role of successor between the king's younger brother, the daring and dangerous Prince Daemon, and his daughter, Princess Rhaenyra. However, both their ambitions are endangered when the king takes a new, younger wife who soon gifts him with more children. Decades later, as the end of the king's reign approaches, the stage is set for a bloody conflict...one in which all sides command the power of dragons.

In addition to the above, the series also stars Graham McTavish as Ser Harrold Westerling, Ryan Corr as Ser Harwin Strong, Jefferson Hall as Lord Jason Lannister and his twin brother Tyland, David Horovitch as Grand Maester Mellos, Matthew Needham as Larys Strong, Bill Paterson as Lord Lyman Beesbury, Gavin Spokes as Lord Lyonel Strong, Wil Johnson as Ser Vaemond Velaryon, John Macmillan (and Theo Nate as a child) as Ser Laenor Velaryon, Savannah Steyn as Lady Laena Velaryon, Ray Strachan as Arthur Velaryon, Bethany Antonia as Baela Targaryen and Phoebe Campbell as Rhaena Targaryen.

The show is executive produced and showrun by Miguel Sapochnik and Ryan Condal, with George R.R. Martin executive producing and advising. The series is based on Martin's 2018 book Fire and Blood. Game of Thrones showrunner-writers D.B. Weiss and David Benioff were not involved in this project.

The release date has an interesting twist: it puts the 10-episode show on at the same time as Amazon Prime's Lord of the Rings prequel series, The Rings of Power, which launches on 2 September.