The best fantasy series on HBO isn't the one everyone is talking about

HBO’s Game of Thrones prequel series House of the Dragon is back for its third season, and by and large, it’s off to a good start. The third season made up for the sluggish pace of Season 2, which opted to end on a series of cliffhangers rather than resolve much of anything, by kicking off with a pair of action-heavy episodes that upended the status quo.

It’s good watching, and there’s even better stuff to come. But the show has proven itself unwilling to break with patterns that keep it from being as good as it could be. Meanwhile, another fantasy HBO series has risen to supplant it.

House of the Dragon still can’t get out of its own way

And it may be too late to change course

House of the Dragon has a couple of dramatic tricks it returns to a little too often for comfort. One of them involves constructing the plot in such a way that the characters have no responsibility for their actions. You can see this in action in the Season 1 finale, when the character of Aemond Targaryen (Ewan Mitchell) loses control of his dragon Vhagar, which then chomps his half-nephew Luke (Elliot Grihault) to death, escalating tensions between rival branches of the Targaryen family. Something similar happens with Aemond’s mother Alicent Hightower (Olivia Cooke), who labors to put her underqualified son Aegon (Tom Glynn-Carney) on the Iron Throne not because she thinks it’s a good idea, but because she misunderstands her husband the king’s dying words, and feels honor-bound to carry out his wishes.

House of the Dragon is nominally based on George R.R. Martin’s book Fire & Blood, where these kinds of motivations are never suggested. In the book, so far as we can tell, Aemond kills his cousin because he wants to, and Alicent supports Aegon because she wants her son on the throne, and because she doesn’t want Aegon’s half-sister Rhaenyra (Emma D’Arcy) anywhere near it. House of the Dragon takes these characters’ purposeful choices from Fire & Blood and replaces them with happenstance, which is less dramatic and less interesting.

And it happens again in the third season. Rhaenyra’s step-daughter Rhaena Targaryen (Phoebe Campbell) mounts a dragon and flies it into the thick of a battle between forces loyal to Rhaenrya on the one side and forces loyal to Aegon on the other. She loses control of her dragon, it burns ships on her step-mother’s side, and then she retreats, horrified at what has happened.

Once again, nothing like this happens in Fire & Blood, but on the show, this trick of happenstance will define Rhaena’s journey from here on out. House of the Dragon seems to want to shield characters it wants us to like from having to take responsibility for their behavior, which limits how compelling they can become. We see the strings.

A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms took things back to basics

And thank goodness for that

Earlier this year, HBO debuted another Game of Thrones prequel series called A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, this one set decades after the events of House of the Dragon. The first season of the show is based on George R.R. Martin’s novella “The Hedge Knight,” which follows an up-and-coming knight named Ser Duncan the Tall (Peter Claffey) as he tries to prove himself at a tournament.

On the one hand, it feels unfair to compare these two shows. House of the Dragon is an expensive, special effects-laden epic with a huge cast and expensive battle scenes, and A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms is a comparatively light-hearted drama that almost never leaves Dunk’s side. But the new show clearly spoke to the fandom. This isn’t ironclad proof of anything, but consider how many people bothered to rate the episodes on IMDb: as of this writing, the most ratings ever logged for an episode of House of the Dragon is 85,466, for the 2022 series premiere. Meanwhile, each of the six episodes from the first season of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms received more votes than that, with the fifth episode getting a staggering 188,851.

House of the Dragon is a great TV show, but A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms felt fresh in a way that it doesn’t. I think part of that is due to AKOTSK (it’s long past time for acronyms) sticking very close to Martin’s source material, whereas HOTD has diverged so sharply that Martin himself called it out in what became an ugly public spat. Of course, that wouldn’t matter if the HOTD writers improved on the text, but they changes they made often watered it down or opened up plot holes that weren’t there before, whereas the writers on AKOTSK trusted in the text to provide them with a solid foundation.

A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms is the future of fantasy on HBO

And maybe in general

A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms also uses its small size to its advantage. While new seasons of House of the Dragon typically take over two years to produce, the second season of AKOTSK is hoping to release new episodes in 2027, about a year after the last batch. It’s not possible for the cast and crew on HOTD to work that fast; the story is just too massive, but AKOTSK can pull it off.

That means fans won’t have to wait an eternity to see the continuing adventures of their favorite characters, and will have fewer chances to forget they even care. In that way, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms is a little like the medical drama The Pitt, another HBO show that is small enough in scale to put out new episodes once per year. After Game of Thrones inspired a wave of massive, movie-level productions, HBO is leading the way again by sizing down. The next crop of big-name fantasy dramas may want to pay attention.

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Room for everyone

At the end of the day, just because you may prefer one of these Game of Thrones prequel shows to the other doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy them both. New episodes of House of the Dragon drop Sunday nights on HBO and HBO Max, and I hope they make an irrefutable case for themselves.

Also, you can always sidestep the Game of Thrones universe entirely and watch another great HBO fantasy drama, in this case one that wasn’t appreciated enough in its time.