Why “House of the Dragon” Was So Hard to Get Back to Watching
Despite it being an objectively well-made show
When I first watched season 1 of HBO’s Game of Thrones prequel House of the Dragon, I had just finished reading its source material Fire & Blood. All of the Aegons, time jumps, and power struggles were clear to me, fresh in my mind. I could keep track of it all.
Then the two-year wait for season 2 started. Unfortunately, this is a trend that I am finding with more and more shows — think of Severance, Bridgerton, Stranger Things, etc. While I absolutely understand that this is going to be a bit par for the course during the age of elite television (an average House of the Dragon episode costs just under $20 million), it still affects the overall flow and story of a serialized television show. Jumping back onto House of the Dragon, I found myself having to get reinvested in characters and reminding myself of everyone’s relationship to each other despite the fact that I read a whole 706-page book for the show.
Let’s look at something like Bridgerton, compared to HOTD. Bridgerton’s survival benefits from it being a semi-anthology of sorts, with each season focusing on a different character in an ensemble. Whether or not you remember what happened in the previous season however many months or years ago is irrelevant to the overall experience.
Despite intense marketing efforts for season 2, House of the Dragon is still a different story compared to something like Bridgerton. House of the Dragon is a very linear story with many moving parts to it. In addition, a marked difference from season 1 is the story pacing. It is implied in season 2 that only a few weeks have passed, (“Only weeks ago my lord husband [Viserys] was alive,” says Queen Alicent [Emilia Cooke] in s2e4), while season 1 spanned decades. House of the Dragon is very much establishing that it laid the ground work already, and now you have to be ready to hold on tight as things hit the fan. Remember everything from season 1? Well, we already have Meleys going into battle at Rook’s Rest — (oh, yeah, remember the other red dragon Meleys).
I like House of the Dragon. It’s committing a very compelling part of Westeros’ history to TV, and I’d really hate to see the show die before the story’s completion — especially after the historically bad reception of Game of Thrones’ ending.
However, House of the Dragon is also working with dense, ambitious material. It’s handling an entire war with many different little details to it, serious repercussions to Westeros, and landmark moments in the Targaryen lineage. The show can’t be too hasty with how it handles things — it must continue to do what it does and explain things to viewers thoroughly.
Luckily, things seem to be picking up viewership-wise. House of the Dragon recently hit a season-high 8.1-million views at the halfway mark, and it was renewed for season 3. This is good news for fans, and the show should hopefully capitalize on these wins to finish the story properly. Going forward, I hope that studio execs learn how to manage these multi-year waits not just with marketing efforts, but with higher fan engagement to keep the actual discourse of the story alive. Not only do I hope this for House of the Dragon, but for so many prestige shows out there.
In the meantime, I’ll continue to support HOTD.
