George R.R. Martin Reveals How Long He Thinks ‘House of the Dragon’ Should Run

Wilson Chapman
·3 min read
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The new “Game of Thrones” prequel “House of the Dragon” has run fast through the events of its “Fire & Blood” source material, with the first season covering a span of 20 years in eight episodes. In a Monday post on his blog “Random Musings,” original series author George R.R. Martin revealed that he hopes the series will continue on this pace to cover the entire Targaryen civil war (or the Dance of Dragons) over four seasons.

“There are only so many minutes in an episode (more on HBO than on the network shows I once wrote for), and only so many episodes in a season … If ‘House of the Dragon’ had 13 episodes per season, maybe we could have shown all the things we had to ‘time jump’ over… though that would have risked having some viewers complain that the show was too ‘slow,’ that ‘nothing happened.’ As it is, I am thrilled that we still have 10 hours every season to tell our tale,” Martin wrote in his blog post. “It is going to take four full seasons of 10 episodes each to do justice to the Dance of the Dragons, from start to finish.”

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Martin also spent the post praising the latest episode of “House of the Dragon,” titled “Lord of the Tides,” which was centered around the death of King Viserys (Paddy Considine), calling it “Everything I hoped it should be.” Although he heavily praised multiple people involved in bringing the episode to life — including series creator Ryan Condal, scriptwriter Eileen Shim and director Geeta Pate — he reserved most of his praise for Considine, calling his portrayal a huge improvement over the character as depicted in the original “Fire & Blood” fictional history book.

“The character he created (with Ryan and Sara and Ti and the rest of our writers) for the show is so much more powerful and tragic and fully-fleshed than my own version in “Fire & Blood” that I am half tempted to go back and rip up those chapters and rewrite the whole history of his reign,” Martin wrote in his post. “Paddy deserves an Emmy for this episode alone. If he doesn’t get one, hey, there’s no justice.”

Elsewhere in the post, Martin addressed the comparisons between “House of the Dragon” and Prime Video’s “Lord of the Rings: the Rings of Power,” which have frequently been compared due to being high-budget fantasy shows airing at the same time. Martin dismissed the supposed rivalry between the shows as existing “in the media,” and said he hopes that both succeed and lead to more fantasy adaptations on television.

“I am a fantasy fan, and I want more fantasy on television, and nothing would accomplish that more than a couple of big hits. ‘The Witcher,’ ‘Shadow & Bone,’ ‘Wheel of Time…’ and ‘The Sandman,’ a glorious adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s groundbreaking comic series… those are a good start, but I want more,” Martin said.

In terms of what adaptations he hopes to see, Martin named many books and authors he hopes to see adapted, including Ursula K. Le Guin’s “Earthsea” series and authors Patrick Rothfuss, Alan Garner, Tad Williams, Joe Abercrombie and Robin Hobb. The fantasy adaptation he most wants though is a series based on Roger Zelazny’s 1970 novel “Nine Princes in Amber,” about a prince named Corwin who is cast out of the world of Amber and ends up as an amnesiac on Earth.

“I will never understand why Corwin and his siblings are not starring in their own show. And hey, if epic fantasy continues to do well, maybe we will finally get that,” Martin wrote. “A boy can dream.”

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