HBO’s House of the Dragon pilot sets up the good Game of Thrones

After eight seasons and more than a decade as a pop culture sensation, it’s easy to forget game of Thrones wasn’t a sure hit when it first aired on HBO in 2011. With the original Lord of the Rings film trilogy firmly in cultural retrospect, and with no fantasy stories to take its place (including the often-forgotten Hobbit trilogy), it probably didn’t seem to get through at all. But that’s not the case with HBO’s new follow-up show house of the dragon. Fantasy TV is big business, Lord of the Rings is back and many people are already desperate for love game of Thrones again after the disappointment of the last few seasons. and house of the dragon‘s pilot uses the good will of his viewers.

The franchise hopes to move forward by looking back; house of the dragon is a prequel set around 200 years before the events of game of Thrones. The series will tell the story of an event known as the Dance of the Dragons, essentially a Targaryen civil war over the succession to the Iron Throne that turned all of Westeros against itself.

These events make up the last half of the book Fire & Blood by A Song of Ice and Fire author George RR Martin. But with half a book before we get to all this, house of the dragon

still has a lot of tablecloths to do before things really get going. And it seems to be taking its time and getting there cautiously – in fact, the pilot is essentially a prequel to the prequel, set over a decade before the big battles in Dance of the Dragons and presenting its two main characters as teenagers rather than adults.

game of Thrones starts with an ice zombie and then slowly, step by step, introduces you to all of its main characters – some that are only there for one season, and others that last for the whole series. Thanks to some clever shortcuts, by the end of the first episode, viewers will have clear heroes to cheer for, clear villains to hate, and at least three or four different storylines that are all just getting started.

In comparison, house of the dragonThe pilot begins with a meeting about who will be the next king and hardly introduces anyone. The main plot is a bit fuzzy, and it’s not clear it’s worth rooting for anyone else – after all, Rhaenyra and Alicent won’t be friends forever. It’s a tightly packed hour that feels made to be revisited once the season (or maybe even the series) can be viewed as a whole. It’s not hard to imagine the pilot leaving some viewers feeling a little lost. The series throws you into a sea of ​​laws, conspiracies, blonde wigs, and complicated names, assuming you’ll figure out most of it eventually.

but house of the dragon is designed for the obsessive, detail-oriented audience that game of Thrones

helped create. At the start of the original series, showrunners David Benioff and DB Weiss worried it would be too confusing for audiences. They have cut corners and eliminated characters for the sake of convenience, cost and clarity, which initially seemed prudent. But the showrunners grossly underestimated their audience, which later proved disastrous when they were missing some of the key pieces of their story. By the time the show reached its cultural peak, even fans who had never touched Martin’s original novels had come up with elaborate theories and could tell you all about the Azor Ahai prophecy.

house of the dragon, at least based on its pilot, seems intent on avoiding this mistake. It seems built for an audience prepared for intricate plots and deep character dives, just as committed to learning the difference between Rhaenys, Rhaenyra and Rhaena as readers of A Song of Ice and Fire have been since 1996 have done. It also lays the groundwork for a very specific ending, which thanks is already in sight Fire & Bloodwhat should give thrones fans some peace of mind for the future.

It’s a high level of trust that you put in viewers, but that trust works both ways; Viewers need to believe that the series is worth their time, too, and that’s a place where house of the dragon

The pilot of is successful. house of the dragonThe pilot of is still entertaining and intriguing. It’s got the bloody fights and smart conversations that did game of Thrones‘ The first few seasons stand out from other shows at the time — and it even has a bit of the show’s signature ‘sex position’, with key character moments playing out in the midst of orgies.

It’s even proving to be essential text for fans, revealing a secret about Aegon the Conqueror, one of Westeros’ most famous and important historical figures that both viewers and readers had long wondered about, but hasn’t been confirmed until now – not even in Fire & Blood. But even with all of that in its favor, it’s intentionally not as fast-paced or as instantly captivating as game of ThronesIt’s been more than a decade since the first episode.

This approach to the opening episode of a series feels like an acknowledgment that television today is very different than it was then game of Thrones Premiered in 2011. This show’s pilot was a million-dollar bet on an ambitious new series. house of the dragonon the other hand, is a billion-dollar bet on a complete story and, WarnerMedia hopes, an entire universe of content and spinoffs. game of Thrones, in its early days, was designed to hook viewers episode after episode and encourage seasonal subscriptions to HBO. Extend the show a little if in doubt, house of the dragonThe first episode of is designed as part of a full story intended to live on forever in HBO Max’s content library as a brief snapshot in the history of a fictional universe.