I expected to hate HBO’s House of the Dragon. After all, the show’s genre-defining predecessor, Game of Thrones, ended its run by slipping on a banana peel and falling into a vat of hot excrement. Also dismaying was a pledge by creators Miguel Sapochnik and Ryan Condal to “pull back” on the new program’s sex scenes while continuing to show sexual assault. Given such a pedigree — not only a diminished forebear but a willingness to engage in open #MeToo contortions — what hope did the series have of being actually good?
Quite a significant one, it turns out.
House of the Dragon’s debut season takes place almost entirely in King’s Landing, the capital city of George R. R. Martin’s fantasy realm of Westeros. As in HBO’s previous journey into that world, the highest prize is the Iron Throne, a seat representing absolute power for whoever possesses it. In Game of Thrones, a king’s unexpected death gave way to a succession crisis as multiple families jostled to replace him. Here, in a series set 200 years earlier, the monarch endures. Yet his descendants nevertheless swarm, buzzing about to ensure that they and their own children inherit the crown when the time comes.
The sovereign this go-round is Viserys Targaryen (Paddy Considine), a kindly ruler whose love of peace obscures both a weak temperament and a sickly constitution. The father of no sons, Viserys has lost his wife in childbirth and wishes to name his daughter, Rhaenyra (Milly Alcock), as heir. Whether the realm will accept a girl as ruler is an open question. Daemon (Matt Smith), the king’s younger brother, thinks not and has designs of his own for the crown. So does Otto Hightower (Rhys Ifans), Viserys’s chief adviser and the father of the highly eligible Alicent (Emily Carey).
From its opening moments, House of the Dragon boasts many of the strengths that made Game of Thrones an international phenomenon. Absent altogether are the hollowness and ephemerality that so often dog the genre. (See, for example, Amazon’s disastrous mounting of the Wheel of Time books.) In their place is a convincing solidity, not least because the supernatural sharpens rather than displaces familiar human longings. Yes, House of the Dragon features terrifying winged beasts with bellies of fire. But it is also a show in which ambitions and loyalties collide, realpolitik conquers all, and a man’s value is what the history books declare it to be and not one copper more.
How else to explain, in episode two, a gambit that draws the season’s battle lines in a single, grim instant of lordly vanity? Aware of Viserys’s vulnerability, Otto Hightower manipulates the king into marrying his teenage daughter. When Alicent gives birth to a son, Hightower determines to place that child rather than Rhaenyra on the throne when the time comes. Accompanying this (relatively) straightforward plot are a number of complications. For one thing, the realm’s nobles have vowed to support Rhaenyra’s claim, come what may. For another, the crafty Lord Velaryon (Steve Toussaint) has his own plans for the Iron Throne, in part because his wife lost an accession battle with then-Prince Viserys some decades in the past.
It is to House of the Dragon’s great credit that these many entanglements remain not only coherent but positively vivid throughout. That this is true despite Martin’s love of indistinguishable names (Rhaenyra, meet Rhaenys, meet Aegon, meet Aemond) is further proof of the show’s narrative mastery. Through five episodes, I was ready to declare the new series to be the most ambitious and darkly fascinating drama of the year. Having now finished the season (with the exception of the finale, which airs just after this magazine goes to print), I am open to the possibility that House of the Dragon will ultimately surpass its famous cousin, so finely tuned are its writing, pacing, and structure.
What happens after episode five? Only a near-total reshuffling of the series’s deck, as events in King’s Landing jump ahead 10 years and the show’s leading actresses are replaced by adult women. Played now by the British stage performer Emma D’Arcy, Rhaenyra is a mature princess ready to back her own claim. Standing in her way is a grown-up Queen Alicent (a superb Olivia Cooke), whose transformation from overwhelmed naif to steely matron is as bleakly credible as anything in Game of Thrones. I will not spoil the action that follows, except to say that alliance-shifting, paternity disputes, and deathbed confessions all figure. So, too, does a third generation of Targaryens, who come of (violent) age before our eyes even as their parents continue to squabble.
House of the Dragon is not a perfect show. Graham McTavish, who did beautiful work in Starz’s Outlander, is utterly wasted as a taciturn knight and bodyguard. Also underused is the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Matthew Needham, whose slithery Lord Larys buys and sells court gossip while stealing every scene in which he appears. Nevertheless, and despite its possession of more talent than it can properly employ, HBO’s prequel is a worthy return to a world still dripping with creative juice. Even its #MeToo-era adjustments are, on review, a smart move. Game of Thrones’s sexual frankness did much to establish the gritty complexion of Westeros. But that job is done now. It’s appropriate to tone things down.
Will House of the Dragon stick its landing, three or four seasons hence? Its predecessor couldn’t and was rightly reviled. And tying things up satisfactorily remains the hardest task in television. For now, however, the series is a must-watch: precise, authentic, and engrossing in its layers and convolutions. For devotees of high fantasy, programming doesn’t get much better than this.
Graham Hillard is managing editor of the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal and a Washington Examiner magazine contributing writer.
