Will House of the Dragon catch fire like Game of Thrones?

How do you follow up a show that defined a decade? Game of Thrones was the essential series of the 2010s, a rare return to appointment television in the age of asynchronous streaming and the first time fantasy on TV was grown-up enough to attract a broad mainstream audience. It won 59 Emmys — a new record for a drama — and was drawing in more than 44mn viewers per episode by its conclusion.

Its successor, House of the Dragon, has some big iron boots to fill. Based on George RR Martin’s 2018 fantastical history book Fire and Blood, it is set about 150 years before Thrones and details the outbreak of the civil war that led to the downfall of the great House Targaryen, ancestors of fan favourite Daenerys, played memorably by Emilia Clarke. When the first season aired in 2022, fans wondered if this prequel would emulate Thrones’ excellent early seasons or its notoriously flubbed finale, and were relieved to find that Dragon delivered the goods. Its debut was HBO’s most watched ever, and the series won the Golden Globe for Best Drama in 2023. Now, with its second season due to begin on June 16, many are wondering whether it will make good on that early promise.

Martin’s umbrella series, A Song of Ice and Fire, has a feverishly dedicated fandom, so the House of the Dragon creators had to think hard about how to satisfy them. Thrones marked the first (and perhaps only) time that fantasy entered the realms of prestige television — it was Succession with dragons, House of Cards with sword fights, The Sopranos with incest. And it had the ingredients to please everybody: political intrigue, spectacular action, rich character drama, thrilling twists, lavish production design and, above all, plenty of sex and violence.

Showrunner Ryan Condal explains over a video call that the core of the approach for Dragon was: “If it isn’t broke, don’t try to fix it.” That extended to the opening music: they simply reused Thrones’ beloved theme.

“Game of Thrones made fantasy feel real,” says Condal. “Sure, it’s about humanity uniting against a dark power, but it’s populated with these incredibly human people that have real-life problems, flaws and weaknesses.”

Dragon also places character-based drama centre stage, but focuses on a single storyline mostly in one location, rather than spinning a web of interconnected tales across a vast landscape. “We approached it like a Shakespearean tragedy,” says Condal. “It’s about one blended family, but that’s a feature rather than a bug of the storytelling. It makes it feel different in a good way from Game of Thrones.”

For a viewer, this narrowed focus is both a blessing and a curse. It has made for richly compelling characters such as queens Rhaenyra (Emma D’Arcy) and Alicent (Olivia Cooke), two mothers vying for power in a male-dominated world. They are surrounded by an excellent cast that includes Rhys Ifans as the scheming Otto Hightower, a nasty yet perversely likeable Matt Smith as Daemon Targaryen, and Eve Best’s superbly dignified Princess Rhaenys, who scored the first season’s most badass moment when she gatecrashed a coronation astride a dragon.

The downside is that by focusing on one family, there is no distraction when the central story wears thin, as with the B-plot involving a war with a half-baked villain known as “Crabfeeder”. Also, with the subtler characterisations of Dragon there are fewer big personalities or obviously likeable characters to get behind. The overall tone is more sombre and less fun — at times it almost feels too prestige.

Where the first season carefully set up the dominoes for the outbreak of the Targaryen civil war, now the pieces begin to topple as the fight for succession boils over following the death of King Viserys (Paddy Considine). However, Condal says the second season will see the main characters venturing beyond the bounds of the Red Keep to raise armies and alliances for the oncoming war.

The showrunner won’t confirm how many seasons are planned, but says the writers have reached the midpoint of the story, and know how it will conclude. The ending is already detailed in Martin’s book, a luxury that Thrones did not have, as the TV series overtook the books (one possible reason for the disappointing final season). There is also a new series in the works from the Martin universe: A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms is about to go into production, adapting his trio of “Dunk and Egg” novellas.

Condal and Martin have developed a close relationship over the years. “George has been called ‘the American Tolkien’, which is quite a mantle to be given, but I agree with it,” Condal says. We’re still reading The Hobbit almost 90 years after it was written, and he believes that even if the TV shows do not have such a long afterlife, Martin’s books will endure. “I think in 50 years, if there still is a human race and a planet Earth, we’ll still be reading them,” he says.

Season 2 of ‘House of the Dragon’ is on HBO and Max in the US from June 16, and Sky Atlantic and Now TV in the UK from June 17

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