The Main Reason ‘House Of The Dragon’ Feels Refreshing After ‘Game Of Thrones’ Season 8

Last night was the premiere of House of the Dragon, the Game of Thrones prequel series that has brought back George RR Martin into the fold, but not the showrunners behind the original Game of Thrones, David Benioff and DB Weiss.

HBO has a lot riding on this and has spent roughly a trillion dollars on marketing for House of the Dragon, so it better be good. And is it?

Yes, it is. At least in that I very much enjoyed that initial pilot episode.

I wasn’t really quite sure what to expect from House of the Dragon, other than I knew the barebones concept that it was about Targaryen family drama. But I feel like this is almost the perfect series to ease us back into the world of Game of Thrones by reminding us what that show lost over time.

When Game of Thrones opened, we had nearly every major character all in the same place, Winterfell, for the events that kicked off the series. Over time, those groups fractured, and by the end, it was not uncommon to be watching a season with pairs of characters scattered across eight cities on two continents, with many disappearing for weeks or even entire seasons at a time, in some cases.

While I’m sure that House of the Dragon will get out of King’s Landing to some degree as things move on, this does seem like a smaller scale production than Thrones. That is not an insult, and I’m also not saying it looks cheap or anything. It’s just a tighter, more focused cast, and what appears to be a main central storyline as opposed to 8-12 threads weaving in and out of each other.

It also goes back to what made Game of Thrones so interesting in those first few seasons, the struggle for power mainly through court drama and personal betrayals. In later seasons, particular 7 and 8, Game of Thrones got such big budgets that it was just throwing these movie-scale battle at us every two weeks. They were fun, I suppose, but it wasn’t really why people fell in love with Game of Thrones in the first place. And all the big battles in the world did not mask the larger problems that had developed within the story itself.

House of the Dragon feels like “back to basics” in many senses. The main conflict is already clear here, an vicious uncle pitted against an anointed princess as they compete for the crown and the future of the family. Sure, there will be subplots, and probably a big battle or two, but this all feels pretty refreshing after the mess that Game of Thrones became in later seasons. A clean slate with an eye toward what made everyone like Game of Thrones originally, before it ran out of source material and had more money than it knew what to do with. I’m certainly eager to see more after last night.

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