[COLUMN] A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms Offers a More Intimate Game of Thrones | by Darren Mooney (Patreon)

Note: This piece contains spoilers for the season premiere of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, which launched on HBO this week. It’s an interesting show. I’ve seen the full six episode season and quite enjoyed it, but it ends stronger than it starts. It takes a little while to figure out its tone and its register, which makes sense given that it’s trying to figure out a new pitch for Game of Thrones. If you want to watch the season premiere completely blind, feel free to bookmark and come back.

Paradoxically, what is most interesting about A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, the latest Game of Thrones spin-off focused on a knight known as Ser Duncan the Tall (Peter Claffey), is how small it is.

Game of Thrones was the biggest television show in the world. Not just in terms of popularity, but in terms of production scale and narrative scope. The show shot across multiple continents, employed nearly 13,000 extras in Northern Ireland alone, and the final season cost a then-unprecedented $15 million per episode to produce. In purely technical terms, it remains a crowning accomplishment of the medium, a weekly television show with the spectacle of a fantasy blockbuster.

The series also boasted an impressive narrative scale. It told an epic saga that unfolded across the fictional continent of Westeros, involving various factions and families locked in a struggle against one another and against the existential threat posed by the Night King (Richard Brake, Vladimir Furdik) and his undead hordes and the returning Queen Daenerys Targaryen (Emilia Clarke) and her dragons. The show featured a sprawling cast of dozens spread across continents.

The first Game of Thrones spin-off, House of the Dragon, was somewhat similar in scale. To be fair, the production was decidedly more constrained than Game of Thrones, shooting primarily in the United Kingdom and using technology like the Volume to emulate the scale of its predecessor. Rather than telling the story of multiple royal houses, House of the Dragon was the story of the collapse of a single regal line. Still, this was a show about dragon warfare, costing “under $20 million per episode.”

Both Game of Thrones and House of the Dragon were products of what has become known as “peak TV.” Although the “peak” refers to the sheer volume of scripted television being produced rather than the cost or quality, the height of that competition for audience’s spending led to absurd spending. Disney was spending “up to $25 million per episode” on their early Marvel television shows and around $15 million per episode of the first season of The Mandalorian.

There are plenty of other examples from other studios. Amazon spent $465 million on the first season of Rings of Power and roughly $50 million per episode of Citadel. On Apple TV+, Severance reportedly costs “more than $20 million an episode.” Netflix’s most recent (and final) season of Stranger Things “had a per-episode cost of $50-$60 million.” That is, to put it frankly, a lot of money to be throwing around, particularly at a volatile time for the industry.

With sequels and spin-offs, the impulse is generally to go bigger. As a rule, sequels and spin-offs tend to be at least equal in scale to what came before, if not larger. “Sequel escalation” is a very real thing. John Wick cost $20 million, which climbed to $40 million for the sequel. The first Iron Man cost $140 million, while the sequel cost $200 million. The first Avengers cost $220 million, while Avengers: Endgame cost $336 million. These increases all significantly outpace inflation.

These past few years have seen studios attempting to get the spending on these projects under control, particularly on the television side. There has been a greater responsibility to manage budgets and spending. Disney has pivoted its Star Wars and Marvel brands back towards theatres, where they can at least make money on their massive investments, and scaled back production on expensive live action television series.

A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms feels very much like a product of this attempt to impose some sort of more modest scale on television production, even within established brands. The series is, in every conceivable way, more modest than either Game of Thrones or House of the Dragon. It feels like a very deliberate effort on the part of HBO and their corporate parent Warner Bros. to determine whether it is possible to bring the fantasy world of Westeros to life in a fiscally responsible way.

The show is quite literally smaller. The first season runs a mere six episodes, tying with the truncated final season of Game of Thrones for the shortest episode count in the franchise. While that final season featured several extended episodes – with the final four episodes each running well over an hour – the first season of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms features shorter instalments. The premiere runs just over forty minutes, while the rest of the season hovers at around half-an-hour-a-piece.

The cast is smaller. There is no actor in A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms as famous as Sean Bean, Mark Addy or Charles Dance during the first year of Game of Thrones. There is no face who might compare to Matt Smith, Rhys Ifans, Olivia Cooke or even Paddy Considine in House of the Dragon. There are respected character actors like Tom Vaughn-Lawlor and Sam Spruell, but the season hinges on relative unknowns former Irish rugby player Peter Claffey and child actor Dexter Sol Ansell.

Even narratively, the scale is much more intimate. Chronologically, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms unfolds in the space between the Targeryan Civil War of House of the Dragon and the twin invasions of Game of Thrones. The last dragon has already died out by the start of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, and the new ones are yet to be born. There is nothing here that threatens to change the course of the history of this fictional continent or its people.

It spoils little to reveal that the bulk of the season is built around a single jousting tournament. Naturally, complications accrue over the course of the series’ six episodes, but they never escalate to the scale of open war or even shadow diplomacy. In Game of Thrones or House of the Dragon, these sorts of tournaments played out in the background of episodes about the wealthy’s cynical politicking and power mongering, distracting confections for the masses. Here, they take focus.

The series never really escalates in scale. Even when the Targeryans become involved, King Daeron II is not an active character within the narrative. When events occur that have the potential to shape the history of Westeros, they are accidental and almost lowkey. Nobody in the show is plotting to usurp the Iron Throne. If anything, Westeros is in its decadent period. There is a broad sense of moral, social and even military decline, but nothing that threatens to boil over at this moment.

It is interesting that one of the most frequent ways of framing Game of Thrones was to discuss the series as a “deconstruction” of classic high fantasy, an argument that tended to discount the show’s willingness to engage with the tropes of the genre like dragons or zombies. While the show began as study of the horrors of royalty and built inevitably to the realization that there is no such thing as “a good queen”, it still indulged in many of the tropes and trappings of works like Lord of the Rings.

At times, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms seeks to actively puncture the relative self-importance of Game of Thrones as a fantasy brand, perhaps even turning the franchise’s somewhat cynical view of human nature upon itself. Game of Thrones has become so large an object in the cultural consciousness that it demands engagement. A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms has to acknowledge Game of Thrones, in the same way that Game of Thrones had to reference Lord of the Rings.

In the opening moments of the premiere, the allegedy-recently-knighted Ser Duncan the Tall considers what to do. He contemplates a return to King’s Landing or Lannisport. He picks up his sword. He could join the Kingsguard. He imagines himself a hero, the sword light in his hand. The camera pushes in on Ser Duncan’s face. The classic Game of Thrones theme (which is also the House of the Dragon theme) stirs. The large brand calls. Epicness awaits. Destiny is on the line.

What follows is a hard cut to Ser Duncan leaning against a tree in the wilderness, defecating to nothing but the sounds of nature and his own relief. He then sets down the road, as decidedly more intimate music plays on the soundtrack. The title card imposes itself over the shot. There is no sprawling opening credits scene, no epic opening music, there is not even a musical sting or a distinctive title card. It is, considering the scale of the franchise to this point, almost quaint.

This is both the best and worst thing about A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms. This smallness is very much the point of the series. It is what the show is about, both narratively and thematically. Stopping at an inn on the way to a tournament to help build his reputation, an innkeeper (Jenna Boyd) points out how meaningless all of this is. “Knights are built the same as other men,” she reflects. “And I never knew a joust to change the price of eggs.” It’s a nice piece of wry contemporary commentary.

Arriving at the tournament, Ser Duncan needs a noble to vouch for him so that he might participate. He is heartbroken to discover that nobody will acknowledge his deceased mentor, Ser Arlan of Pennytree (Danny Webb). “Ser Arlan took a wound in your father’s service,” Ser Duncan appeals to Ser Manfred Dondarrion (Daniel Monks). “How could you have forgotten him?” Ser Manfred coldly replies, “We’ve forgotten men that reaped much more than a wound.”

This is a solid central hook for A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, a series about those who live in the shadow of the Great Houses of Westeros and the larger arc of history. Over the course of the season, the series galvanizes into an interesting examination of that idea, but it takes a little while. The opening episodes of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms struggle a little bit with trying to figure out what a smaller-scale version of Game of Thrones might look like.

In its first couple of episodes, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms teeters on the edge of broad comedy and outright farce, but seems reluctant to commit. This is probably for the best, given how the season ultimately plays out, but it does create a weird tonally imbalance. While the series seeks to somewhat deflate the self-importance of the larger Game of Thrones franchise around it, it remains beholden to it.

The result is an interesting and entertaining show, something that feels like an earnest experiment to figure out how far the Game of Thrones brand can stretch. It is perhaps telling that A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms premieres in the same year as the third season of House of the Dragon, so the series does not have the burden of carrying the Game of Thrones franchise on its own shoulders. A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms is fun, light and endearing.

Maybe that’s enough.