Watching ‘House of the Dragon’ as a ‘Game of Thrones’ Skeptic

I couldn’t stand the thought of watching anything with Grand Maesters or Valyrian steel again, but I gave the new series a chance anyway.

I have a high tolerance for annoyances. If a restaurant confuses my order, I’ll take what I was given. If a friend wakes me up with a phone call, I tell them I was awake. But there are people who I get annoyed with extremely easily—including when they say or do something fairly normal. My girlfriend calls it “irritation bias”: being irritated by something because it came from a person you find irritating, not because the thing itself actually irritates you.

To mitigate my biases, I made a sort of test for myself: Whenever someone who often gets on my nerves says something that I find annoying, I imagine that my best friend—someone who can generally do no wrong in my eyes—was the person who said it. If I still find what they said annoying, then I know my reaction is probably fair, or at least sincere. But if what they said wouldn’t be annoying coming from my best friend, I reconsider how to react.

I have an irritation bias against Westeros. After reading A Song of Ice and Fire (the book series on which Game of Thrones is based) and watching Game of Thrones, anything with Grand Maesters, milk of the poppy, and Valyrian steel felt almost unimaginable. But when the HBO prequel series House of the Dragon was announced, I wanted to give it a chance in hopes that it could be like Better Call Saul—the type of spin-off that’s better than it has any right to be. I wanted to beat my bias and appreciate what the new series had to offer.

Either I failed in overcoming my bias, or House of the Dragon doesn’t offer much. House of the Dragon is a bland, emotionally dull attempt to capitalize on the success of Game of Thrones.

In the early 2010s, everyone loved Game of Thrones. I wrote in a previous Humans Being about the anticipation I felt for Game of Thrones’s second season, which I still consider to have been the best time for the fandom:

Anticipation for a sophomore effort is fandom in its purest form. It’s the brief moment of heaven between loving something that exists and hoping for something more to come. Everything is perfect and nothing has been ruined—you’re left only to dream, and the sky’s the limit. It’s what I felt watching the “Seven Devils” trailer for Season 2 of Game of Thrones. It’s the greatest trailer ever made, a perfect moment for the fandom, and we chased that high every season after. I still watch it every now and then, just to remember how I felt the first time I saw it.

Game of Thrones continued to dominate in ratings and awards even in its worst seasons. It was a cultural phenomenon and the last icon of appointment television, making its highly promoted spin-off worth considering if only for its potential to take over conversations everywhere you go.

House of the Dragon, which premieres this Sunday on HBO and is based on George R. R. Martin’s Fire & Blood novel, begins almost 200 years prior to Game of Thrones and follows the Targaryen reign that will eventually lead to Daenerys Targaryen. King Viserys rules the Seven Kingdoms but doesn’t have a son, meaning he must choose between making his unscrupulous brother, Daemon, his heir, or naming his daughter the first female heir in history. The series leans into the trappings of the original series: Expect dragons, gore, incest, and the incessant question of who will win the Iron Throne. But House of the Dragon focuses more on family successorship than on outside threats (the Targaryens have dragons that could crush any would-be usurpers), shrinking the scope of Westeros to one family and the people tied to it.

Ollie Upton / HBO

The narrower focus helps with the storytelling: Fewer characters and kingdoms allows more screen time for King Viserys; his daughter, Princess Rhaenyra; and his brother, Daemon. But the series spans more than a decade, leading to jarring time jumps. After the first two episodes, the series leaps forward two years; later, it jumps a decade and exchanges its younger cast for adult versions of their characters.

But House of the Dragon suffers most from a lack of charisma. Without characters like Tyrion or Arya, viewers are left to attach to the well-trodden politics of the Iron Throne. By now, one of the challenges of emotionally buying into Westerosi drama is the fact that this world is so awful that ruling it hardly matters. The series makes a slight attempt to pivot in its theme, focusing on the kingdom’s resistance to a woman leader, but few characters have motivations outside of the standard fare of either chasing the king’s crown or serving him honorably. What should feel like an a-ha moment for the history that led to Daenerys Targaryen is instead a rather muddy, lifeless rehashing of medieval war and house politics.

It’s difficult to replicate how fans felt after the first season of Game of Thrones. If not for the recent success of the Breaking Bad spin-off Better Call Saul, I might have thought it would be impossible to follow an iconic drama with something even remotely comparable. But after Game of Thrones ended in disappointment, perhaps the best way a spin-off could have reclaimed fans like me would have been to add more distance from the Westeros we knew instead of hewing so closely to the old formula. Ultimately, House of the Dragon does little to reframe how I felt toward the end of the original series. Worse, though, is that House of the Dragon isn’t cohesive, resonant, or interesting enough to stand on its own. Westeros doesn’t irritate me, but the charmless exploits of the Targaryen family do. It’s probably not worth watching, even if Westeros was your favorite place to spend time.

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Thanks to everyone who responded to my last Humans Being about Legacy, the Los Angeles Lakers, and connecting with my father through basketball. My favorite response came from Daniel, who wrote:

“Connecting with my dad was through hunting and fishing.  We didn’t follow professional sports or play organized sports like Little League; we were on a lake or river, or a harvested corn field pursuing pheasants.  We shared outdoor magazines, visits to the sporting goods stores, and trading fish stories with the ‘old timers.’

Now I remember my dad through what he left me; his shotgun, a couple of homemade fishing lures, an unquenchable thirst for the outdoors, and wonderful memories … Every time I go fishing, he’s with me. I haven’t hunted in 40 years, but come fall I still get the itch. So, next week I’m heading to Canada to fish, and he’ll be with me in the boat.”