Discount Dance of Dragons
James Hibberd
My main issue with season two of House of the Dragon was putting Daemon Targaryen on ice for, I don't know, the whole fucking season. Yes, the payoff in the finale episode was nice, with him effectively "waking up", but we didn't need six hours of bed time to build up to it. Especially when time is clearly limited on the show – more on that below. Everyone else's main issue after the finale: why did the season end with nothing more than a build up to something we won't get to see for two years, at least?
The answer, it seems, is because Warner Bros Discovery is cheap, sadly (shocking, I know). No one will come out and say this directly, but they don't need to. It's all right there in various stories over the past couple of years. First, as James Hibberd reports for The Hollywood Reporter yesterday:
In one bit of news, Condal confirmed that the series will very likely conclude with season four (“No, I think it’s four,” he said when asked if the fantasy drama will run five seasons). And he noted the rest of the story’s plan was mapped out after the first season. He also said season three will go into production early next year. In addition, the next season will likely also consist of eight episodes.
If House of the Dragon was 10 episodes long – as the first season was, and as was clearly originally planned for all of the seasons – we would have had our pay-off this coming week and next. Instead, we have to wait until season 3, likely in 2026, which will also be only 8 episodes long. Everyone wants 10 episodes, including George R.R. Martin himself.1 But WBD/HBO only greenlit 8:
About the finale and the decision to push 'The Battle of the Gullet' to season three, Condal gave a lengthy reply, but it seemed to come down to resource management.
“One of the challenges of making television at any scale [is] nobody has infinite time and resources,” he said. “When you’re as a showrunner, you’re always in the position of having to balance storytelling and the resources that you have available to tell that story. One of the things that came into play in season two is: What is the final destination of the series and where are we going? It was a combination of factors that led us to rebalance the season knowing now where we’re going. We wanted to rebalance the story in such a way that we had three great seasons of television [after season one] to round out and tell this story. When you’re trying to mount the show, which requires a tremendous amount of resources, construction, armor, costumes, visual effects … we are trying to give 'The Gullet' — which is arguably the second most anticipated action event of Fire & Blood — trying to give it the time and the space that it deserves.”
He continued, “We are building to that event that will happen very shortly in terms of the storytelling, and it should be the biggest thing to date that we’ve we’ve pulled off. We just wanted to have the time and the space to do that at a level that is going to excite and satisfy the fans in the way it’s deserved. We also wanted to build some anticipation toward it. So I apologize for the wait, but … with the team that we have together, we’re going to pull off a hell of a win with 'The Battle of the Gullet'.”
It's a nice answer, but it still dances around the 8 versus 10 episode debate. If this season had been 10 episodes, they would have been able to do 'The Battle of the Gullet' this year. And it feels like to pretty much everyone that this should have been the resolution of the season. Condal might say that it would have messed with the arc of season 3 but I don't buy it. We're going to get 'The Gullet' in the first two episodes of that season, which will be exciting, but then a weird come down from that, I imagine. Again, clearly it was meant to be a season finale type thing. But they didn't have the time/runway to make it happen in terms of narrative.
Back in early 2023, this was playing out in real time, as Nellie Andreeva reported for Deadline:
In what is a relatively common practice, HBO did not reveal the episode order in the Season 2 renewal announcement last summer. I hear the initial plan was for another 10-episode arc, which eventually changed, leading to some script rewrites. Given the leadership change at HBO’s parent company, some pointed at Warner Bros. Discovery leadership’s focus on cost-cutting. An HBO spokesperson, who confirmed to Deadline that Season 2 will contain 8 episodes, stressed that the episode count trim was story-driven.
Perhaps "story-driven" after they were told it would be 8 episodes instead of 10 a season? Andreeva goes on to make the case that the 8-episode arcs may have led to the move towards four seasons, instead of three:
It has been reported that House of the Dragon’s creative team had envisioned the series running for three or four seasons. I hear executive producer-showrunner Ryan Condal, working with author/executive producer George R.R. Martin, took a step back as Season 2 was being put together to take a big-picture view of the series, which follows Martin’s Fire & Blood, and figure out the overall narrative flow, including how to break up the stories season-to-season and what battles to include and when.
As part of that, I hear Season 3 has been mapped out and might be greenlighted, with HBO seriously considering committing to moving ahead with scripts, casting and a production plan as the network too is trying to think long-term instead of season-to-season.
With a portion of the plot originally intended for Season 2, including a major battle, moving to Season 3, I hear it is now more likely that the series would run for four seasons, but that has not been determined as Condal and Martin continue to go back-and-forth on the number of seasons (three or four) that would be optimal to tell the full story, sources said.
Again, none of this is disputing the notion that 10 episode arcs would have been ideal, but given that they likely only had 8 to work with, they had to tweak things. In fact, one may ask why "a portion of the plot originally intended for Season 2, including a major battle" was moved to season 3? WBD/HBO would have you believe it was all a narrative choice, but that's seemingly misdirection. It's a narrative choice to fit within an 8-episode constraint. As Martin – who may know a thing or two about the story arc here – said back in 2022:
But 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. Fewer and fewer as time goes by, it seems. When I was a boy, shows had 39 episodes a season. By the time I was writing for BEAUTY AND THE BEAST, it was down to 22. Cable shrunk that even further. THE SOPRANOS had 13 episodes per season, but just a few years later, GAME OF THRONES had only 10 (and not even that, those last two seasons). 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. (RINGS OF POWER has only 8, as you may have noticed, and my AMC show DARK WINDS is doing 6 episode seasons). I hope that will continue to be true. 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.
I went ahead and highlighted the key bit there. We're not getting four full seasons of 10 episodes each. We got one full season of 10 episodes – greenlit before WBD took over HBO – and now three more seasons of 8 episodes. I'll do the math for you: that's six fewer episodes than Martin envisioned. That's money WBD can instead put towards securing the NBA rights... AIR BALL!
And, fine, if they can get it all in. But this is IP with an infamous history of failing to "cram it all in" in spectacular fail fashion. How WBD and HBO wouldn't take what happened to the final season(s) of Game of Thrones into account here, I don't know. Money wins, I guess. And we're now seeing that decision play out in House of the Dragon, I fear. This season clearly should have been 10 episodes.
One more thing: You know who would spend all the money required on House of the Dragon? Just saying...
M.G. Siegler
1 How awesome is it that George R.R. Martin still regularly blogs? Everything about his site is perfect. It's dated design, the fact that the formatting is all wonky, the tag cloud! It's pure early 2000s blogging in 2024 by one of the wealthiest and most successful authors in the world. Yes, yes, I wish he would spend the time on the remaining books too, but sometimes a guys just gotta blog it out...