As of 2024, we can probably agree the golden age of television is over. We’re in an era of “slop,” content for content’s sake. While HBO shows like House of the Dragon try to hang on to prestige status, they have the same energy as the later Targaryen kings desperately clinging to the glory of Old Valyria. If the streaming wars are analogous to the Dance of the Dragons, then TV networks have been left too weakened and paywalled for their shows to gain mainstream acclaim. Budgets have decreased as a response to lower viewership, but that just compounds the problem—has America learned nothing about spending its way out of a recession?
I thought season one of HOTD was actually better than most seasons of Game of Thrones. It has a strong central relationship that ties the plot together better than a half-dozen disconnected arcs, which by season three of GOT were completely out of control. It’s extremely character-driven, keeping the dramatic tension juicy rather than bogging itself down with too many moving parts that serve plot functions the audience struggles to keep track of. It also handles the higher-level political machinations that it does take on gracefully, tying plot developments to concrete action rather than giving us a bunch of talking heads. I also found the dialogue to be much higher-level than GOT, whose scenes devolved into a very predictable pattern of beats as the show went on.
Unfortunately, season two undid these strong points from season one. My main critique of the show can be summed up as a single structural issue: it felt like a lot of scenes happened in HOTD season two, but at the end of an hour you generally didn’t feel like you watched an episode. Daemon tripped balls in Harrrenhal all season with all his character development smooshed into the finale, Rhaenyra spent most episodes fretting to different characters about whether she’s really cut out for the throne, and the Velaryons mostly did random sidequests. The Greens are carrying the show, for a key reason: they spent the season in King’s Landing backstabbing each other. These characters at least were part of the same story.
I saw an interview with Jesse Armstrongonce where he said he structured almost every episode of Succession around an event or trip as way to tie the storylines together. Birthday parties, weddings, and funerals put characters in the same space and make them feel relevant to each other. For instance, one episode centers around a bomb threat called in to the main building of the Roy family’s news network. Some of the characters have to hide; Tom and Greg share a top-ten scene about Tom’s ongoing attempt to avoid prison while they’re in a safe room. Other characters hear about it and react as they go about their storylines; it grounds those events in a larger context.
For HOTD, physical location doesn’t have to be an obstacle to this strategy. Daemon and Rhaenyra were often apart in season one, but their sexual tension didn’t suffer—if you can call it sexual tension when your uncle has groomed you since you were a teenager, but I digress! In Succession, there are seasons where Kendall rarely interacts with Logan, but they’re always keeping tabs on each other. For each HOTD episode this season, you’d be hard-pressed to sum up what the episode was about in a sentence or two, but with Succession, you can say, “Logan takes Tom, Roman, and Greg to a conservative donor event where they’ll pick the next president, and Kendall tries to get Tom to leak information about it.”
Some of HOTD‘s best episodes follow this formula: the episode where they go hunting, for example. Young Rhaenyra is chafing at the expectations placed on her as a princess, while Viserys feels pressured to find her a husband. The hunt gives suitors an opportunity to woo Rhaenyra and/or Viserys, eventually prompting Rhaenyra to run off into the woods with Criston Cole as an act of rebellion. Meanwhile, Alicent tries to keep the peace while her two Targaryens become increasingly tense toward each other.
In another episode, Rhaenyra visits King’s Landing to introduce Viserys to her new babies. While Aemond and Aegon beef with her kids, she and Daemon beef with Alicent, and the tension around Viserys’s health grows. The episode peaks at the tense family dinner where Aemond calls Rhaenyra’s sons “Strong boys,” inflaming all conflicts at work in the episode. Now that’s television!
Compare that to one recent episode of HOTD: Daemon doesn’t know who’s slipping him hallucinogenic potions, so he asks the strange woman who hangs around Harrenhal making prophecies and stirring an ominous looking cauldron if she can help him figure it out. Rhaenyra tries to find a rider for the dragon Seasmoke, but the only candidate gets roasted in his armor, and then later she makes out with Mysaria. Alicent can’t control Aemond anymore, and Ser Criston is gonna head back out to the Riverlands soon because… why again?
The show tried to tie these plotlines together in the finale by having Rhaenya and Daemon link up at Harrenhal to plan an attack on King’s Landing, but the damage had already been done. If the writers want to get HOTD back on its feet for season 3, they need to be mindful that six separate plotlines does not a TV show make. To solve the issue of geographical distance, having Rhaenyra and Alicent receive and react to the same piece of news (like when Alicent’s grandchild was killed toward the start of the season) would make their scenes connect to each other. Or they could keep visiting each other secretly—Dragonstone and King’s Landing are about as close to each other as New York and Philly.
With a sense of shared context re-established (rather than every scene just falling out of a coconut tree), it would be less disruptive to have Daemon hang out at Harrenhal for a whole season and do the same thing every episode, but the second requirement for a better season 3 would be for the plotlines to move the hell along. Why did Daemon need to do Alys Rivers’ ayahuasca every day for weeks to have his season-finale realization?
I also think the show didn’t think through how a war with dragons would actually work, but a military strategy deep-dive on this World War I moment for Westeros is a subject for another article… Here’s hoping the show continues long enough for me to do that soon!
