“I think that’s actually a gift is coming into this incredibly well-realized world. I think the daunting part is trying to follow the most successful television series of all time and daring to think you have something to say in that universe,” explains “House of the Dragon” showrunner Ryan Condal about his HBO prequel to the Emmy-winning “Game of Thrones.” We talked to Condal as part of our “Meet the Experts” TV showrunners panel. Watch our complete video interview above.
“House of the Dragon,” which premiered its second season in 2024, takes place 200 years before the events of “Thrones” and follows the Targaryen family long before the birth of Daenerys (Emilia Clarke). The key to the series was “finding the right path to it and not just continuing the story because everybody wants to revisit Westeros and see more people in blonde wigs and their dragons.”
One difference between the two shows is that, “believe it or not, we actually have fewer points of view I think than the original series did.” That focus was “one of the things that we really locked into early with how we broke ‘House of the Dragon,’ which was that essentially it was going to be a Greek tragedy about this one family.” There’s also the crucial difference of the source materials. “It’s based on a history book. So you have a lot of sketches of things, of characters, of ideas, of events in history, but you don’t really have all the details that were present in the original books that the original series was based on. So there is a ton of invention required.”
The upshot is that the writing process takes “six months to a year. And there’s just lots of iterations, and lots of Google documents and tracking documents, and lots of index cards up on the board. And I think we just try to break the individual character stories against the plot points that we know we need to hit and then figure out how to interweave them.” But “that’s, in many ways, the most fun.”
