‘We have to top ourselves’: House Of The Dragon creator on high expectations for Season 2

LOS ANGELES – Imagine you are a writer or producer on House Of The Dragon, the latest television adaptation of the work of beloved American fantasy author George R.R. Martin.

And a few weeks before the new season of your show is due to air – on June 17, on HBO and HBO Go – he writes an essay saying almost all screen adaptations of books are worse than the source material.

In a scathing May 24 post on his blog titled The Adaptation Tango, the 75-year-old – whose fantasy epic A Song Of Ice And Fire was turned into the Emmy-winning Game Of Thrones (2011 to 2019) and its prequel, House Of The Dragon (2022 to present) – did not mention either show by name.

But he wrote: “Everywhere you look, there are more screenwriters and producers eager to take great stories and ‘make them their own’.

“It does not seem to matter whether the source material was written by Stan Lee, Charles Dickens, Ian Fleming, Roald Dahl, Ursula K. Le Guin, J.R.R. Tolkien, Mark Twain, Raymond Chandler, Jane Austen, or… well, anyone.”

“No matter how major a writer it is, no matter how great the book, there always seems to be someone on hand who thinks he can do better, eager to take the story and ‘improve’ on it,” says Martin, who in 2022 told The New York Times he had been kept “out of the loop” by the creators of the last four seasons of the Game Of Thrones series.

“They never make it better, though. Nine hundred ninety-nine times out of a thousand, they make it worse,” adds Martin, before praising the historical drama Shogun (2024 to present), adapted from a book by James Clavell, as the rare exception.

In a Zoom interview on June 4, The Straits Times asked House Of The Dragon showrunner Ryan Condal what he made of Martin’s comments.

The 44-year-old American writer-producer laughs awkwardly and dances around the question.

“George and I have had plenty of contact over the long history of making House Of The Dragon together,” he says of Martin, who is credited as a co-creator of House Of The Dragon, unlike with Game Of Thrones, which named American writer-producers David Benioff and D.B. Weiss as its creators.

“We crafted the start of the show together five years ago, figured out which period of the history we were going to start in, and I wrote the pilot in close contact with him, and then a series bible that laid out the plan for this story.

“And I have access to him. I have his (2018) novel Fire & Blood, which is our guide post for making this story – but it’s an adaptation, and Fire & Blood is a particularly challenging adaptation because it is (written as if it were) a mediaeval history book that provides three different versions of the same history, and they sometimes disagree with one another and there are intentional holes in the narrative,” explains Condal, who co-created the science-fiction drama Colony (2016 to 2018).

“Adaptation is always a tricky thing,” he adds.

“The screenwriter’s task is to try to understand the core essence of what the story is, and bring alive what makes that narrative unique and relevant to the world, taking into consideration the original text but also the medium they’re adapting into.

“And I think Fire & Blood does have to shift and transmogrify and evolve a bit to be a story that you can tell in a traditional television narrative.”

The task is easier for Season 2, though.

Condal says: “(First seasons) are always difficult, and you don’t know what the show is and you don’t really have anything at the outset except for a script, so you have to build it from scratch.

“The advantage going into Season 2 is we have a lot of the pieces in place – this wonderful cast, and lots of sets have been built and costumes sewn.”

That said, House Of The Dragon 2 has grown more complex. Fans can expect to see Westeros, the main continent in the story, on the brink of a bloody civil war with the Green and Black Councils fighting for King Aegon (Tom Glynn-Carney) and Queen Rhaenyra (Emma D’Arcy) respectively – each side believing theirs to be the rightful claim to the Iron Throne.

“It naturally gets broader and more spread out as we go on, so that meant more locations and sets – and days when we were shooting two, sometimes three, units at once.”

There are more elements to unpack this season.

At a 2023 event held in Los Angeles to promote the show to Emmy voters, Condal promised fans they would meet five new dragons in Season 2.

And at the recent New York premiere of the new season, he said it would feature two of the biggest action sequences the show has filmed, involving “lots of dragons and fire and action”, reported the ET entertainment news outlet.

“This is a rapidly evolving narrative. There are lots of cards to be turned over as this season unfolds, and we are going to end in a very different place than where we began,” he says in the Zoom interview.

The pressures on him and the cast have evolved as well.

English actor Matt Smith, who plays the impetuous Prince Daemon Targaryen, admits he was surprised at how well the critically acclaimed first season did.

The series premiere was watched by over 10 million viewers across broadcast television and the Max streaming platform (formerly HBO Max) on the first day, the biggest debut in HBO’s history. Its finale was watched by 9.3 million viewers, the highest viewership for any finale of an HBO show since the series finale of Game Of Thrones.

Smith, 41, who portrayed Prince Philip in the historical drama The Crown (2016 to 2023), says he was just “surprised and delighted when people responded in the way that they did, and it got into the zeitgeist in the way that it did”.

English actor Glynn-Carney, who plays the ambitious Aegon Targaryen, son of King Viserys (Paddy Considine), felt the weight of appearing in the follow-up to the wildly successful Game Of Thrones – “but in all the right ways”.

The 29-year-old, who appeared in the war movie Dunkirk (2017), says: “It makes us feel like we need to earn people’s appreciation.

“We were lucky that Season 1 went down as well as it did.

“Now, it’s kind of like the second album – the first one’s been great, and now we’ve got to come back and hit the ground running with this one.

“And we hope we have. In my opinion, it is bigger and more explosive – and the drama and the stakes are a lot higher. Everybody’s becoming increasingly desperate and that makes for an exciting watch.”

Condal feels like the show now has its own fan base.

“I think in Season 1, the pressure was simply creating a new show in a beloved franchise that had its own intrinsic worth and could stand on its own two feet.

“That was the thing that haunted me in the three years that it took to get that season going.

“In a way, I think we accomplished what we were trying to do. We told the story that resonated with the fans, and that seemed to not only honour what was great about the original show but also go in a new direction,” he says.

But the challenge with Season 2 is “now we have to top ourselves”.

“So, while I don’t lie awake at night wondering if anybody is going to come and watch the show, I am also aware that the expectations are very high, and we need to deliver,” he says.”

“I’m hoping we’ve done that.”