Get ready to return to Westros tonight! House of the Dragon is roaring back to HBO at 9 p.m. ET/PT after two years . But I assure you it’s worth the wait! Don’t believe me? Ask showrunner Ryan Condal. We had a chance to chat with him about all the stops he, along with the cast and crew, have pulled to up the ante from Season 1.
When we last left the Targaryens, Queen Rhaenyra was ready to finally go to war with Alicent Hightower over the shocking death of her secondborn son, Lucerys (Luke) Velaryan. And it’s that conflict that sets up the exciting incidents you’ll see in the first few episodes of this season. And Condal was thankfully on hand at a roundtable interview, we had the pleasure of attending, to walk us through the exciting new developments in the Fire and Blood adaptation.
NOC: Hey Ryan! It’s an honor to meet you, and thanks so much for all of this. I wanted to ask, with the terrific reception of Season 1, did you feel any pressure from the fans to up the ante for Season 2? And what sort of lessons from the first season did you bring into this one?
Condal: I don’t know any showrunner that would say they made a “perfect Season 1.” Even if we as the audience see perfection in a Season 1, there’s always a showrunner kicking themselves for the things they did wrong. It’s just a natural creative process. We’re always looking to improve ourselves, and I think we definitely went through an extensive post-mortem process after making Season 1 to try and figure out not only what we can do better, but all the things we did well and how do we do more of that…but the joy and reward in making a Season 2 is to have another chance to try and top yourself and 1-Up yourself.
The thing about Season 1 that probably stressed me out the most was whether anyone would watch the show. Does anybody care? How do you follow a monolith like Game of Thrones? You don’t. You just try to do your own thing and have it stand on its own two feet. And I think we did that. And now we have to deliver on these high expectations we set with the audience. And they’re going to have to be the judge of that.
With this universe just being as massive as it is, and with other spin-offs potentially taking place in this universe later on, were you mandated to keep to specific segments of the universe so that they don’t spill over into other shows? Or were you just allowed to tell the story of Fire and Blood completely? Was there anything you couldn’t use?
No. I always felt I had good narrative freedom to tell the story we wanted to tell. The nice thing is the Targaryen dynasty is that they rule for almost 300 years. So there’s a lot of leeway. Not everything is packed into a dense period of time. I think the big things we’re very conscious of doing is keeping the history in tact and the canon. So decisions we make in our story – making sure we don’t kill off a character that becomes a king later on in the history. Those big things where a small moment in your story could have a ripple effect that goes on to affect the history…So we don’t want to cause large ripple effects that will prevent someone from telling The Blackfire Rebellion story, or telling the story of Robert’s Rebellion…so we think about those things.
I’m in regular communication with Ira Parker, who is creating the Duck and Egg series, which, even though it’s not a Targaryen story, it does happen when the Targaryens are still in power. So there’s generational interlinkage between our show and his show. Again there’s no direct crossover because it happens many years in the future. But we’re very conscious of those things and keeping the expanded universe alive so there isn’t a bunch of folding and tucking that needs to be done in the future.
As someone who has seen the first four episodes of this season, I can safely say that audiences will definitely not be disappointed with where this terrific story is going. And that’s very much thanks to Condal and his terrific crew! Be sure to check out the Season Premiere of House of the Dragon only on HBO and Max tonight at 9 p.m. ET/PT