The first trailer for A Knight Of The Seven Kingdoms, the new Game Of Thrones prequel/spinoff, just dropped. It looks fantastic. It looks better than the original show, though I suppose I’m saying that partly because the ending of the original show left such a bitter taste in my mouth.
A Knight Of The Seven Kingdoms is based on the Dunk & Egg novellas by George R.R. Martin. Unlike House Of The Dragon, which was based on Martin’s “history” book, Fire & Blood, these novellas are narrative tales about Ser Duncan the Tall and his diminutive squire, Egg. Fire & Blood was written as a history book, with little dialogue and lots of narrative gaps to fill in for the adaptation. A Knight Of The Seven Kingdoms will presumably be closer to the actual text – as evidenced by Martin’s enthusiasm over the series.
Here’s the trailer:
Compare this to the absolutely dreadful first trailer for Netflix’s The Witcher Season 4 and you can see just how badly other streamers have dropped the ball when it comes to recapturing the magic of Game Of Thrones.
I have not been this excited about a new show in a very, very long time. I certainly haven’t been this excited for a fantasy series, or for anything related to Westeros and the Game Of Thrones universe.
A Knight Of The Seven Kingdoms debuts on January 18th on HBO Max and will consist of just six episodes in its first season. I love these novellas because they’re more contained than A Song Of Ice And Fire, and because they’re smaller-scale adventures rather than epic fantasy. This is a story of knight errantry about a hedge knight and his squire who find themselves caught up in adventures great and small, jousting and fighting in tourneys, and making their way across Westeros in a time of relative peace.
The show will be set roughly halfway between the events of House of the Dragon and Game Of Thrones – about 100 years before the time of Daenerys Targaryen and Jon Snow and roughly 70 years after the Dance of Dragons, when that bloody civil war left the great Houses of Westeros in tatters.
The trailer shows Ser Duncan (aka Dunk) as he and Egg encounter a number of colorful characters, including a brief glimpse of the Dornish puppeteer, Tanselle “Too Tall” (Tanzyn Crawford), as well as Aerion Targaryen (Finn Bennett), Daeron Targaryen (Henry Ashton) and Lyonel Baratheon (Daniel Ings).
We also get a sense of the show’s lighter tone. While the stories do get quite serious at times, there is also humor and whimsy – two things utterly lacking in House Of The Dragon, which is almost oppressively dour. Game Of Thrones at least had comic relief thanks to characters like Tyrion and Bronn and the Queen of Thorns.
In any case, unless this trailer is very misleading and George R.R. Martin is wrong, this is going to be a huge hit and might even restore people’s’ faith in the wider Game Of Thrones project. I love every frame of this trailer, from the knights crashing into one another in a joust, to the misty fields of combat, to Dunk woofing at Egg as they bicker over dogs. Now if only Martin would finish the books!
Here’s the poster HBO also recently released for the show:
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