Did you catch that news about House of the Dragon HBO leaked last week.
No? You missed it? Not surprising since the news drew a collective yawn from just about everyone on the planet. Someone needs to break it to HBO that their vaunted prequel to Game of Thrones is probably dead on arrival.
Maybe network brass are hoping that enough time will have passed since the universally hated conclusion to A Game of Thrones to give House of the Dragon a fighting chance. If that’s the case, they’re kidding themselves. Game of Thrones had arguably the worst ending in television history and virtually every fan on the planet hated it. GoT went from being a pop cultural phenomenon that had everyone talking on Monday mornings to something people refused to even acknowledge overnight.
People talk about great TV shows long after they’ve called it quits. The Friends reunion airing later this year will probably attract more eyeballs to HBOMax than the SnyderCut of Justice League. People are already asking the stars of The Big Bang Theory if they’ll ever get together for a reunion of their own and it’s only been off the air for two years. After FOX unceremoniously canceled Firefly in 2003, fans rallied and helped get a movie made to tell one last story about Captain Reynolds’ crew of misfits before giving the franchise some well deserved closure.
But Game of Thrones’ ending inspired nothing but heartache, disappointed outrage and eventually silence.
Absolutely nobody has been talking about Game of Thrones since it went off the air. It’s been complete radio silence. How bad was the fan hate for GoT’s conclusion? A petition demanding HBO remake the entire final season collected over 1.7 million signatures. That’s a lot of names and a lot of hate. even some of the actors hated it. That’s why you could hear a pin drop during HBO’s House of the Dragon news drop; GoT’s conclusion left such a repulsive taste in so many mouths that nobody cared.
Need another example? The backlash to the series finale was so venomous it may have cost show runners David Benioff and D.B Weiss their Star Wars trilogy. Everyone involved claimed it was because of other factors, but it can’t be ignored that their Star Wars gig fell through while the howls of fan outrage were still ringing in everyone’s ears (and Star Wars head honcho Kathleen Kennedy’s plate was already pretty full of franchise fan anger).
The deadly absence of buzz isn’t HBO’s only problem. Whenever House of the Dragon launches (probably sometime in either 2022 or 2023) it will have little to no fan anticipation. But there’s another giant red flag waving the network right in the face.
And that’s George R.R. Martin himself.
Martin published the first volume of his Game of Thrones prequel in 2018. Set 300 years before The Song of Fire and Ice saga, Martin created the prequel after carving huge chunks out of The World of Fire and Ice companion book. The first half was met with mild (at best) critical and fan reviews and the publisher hasn’t released any sales numbers for it (which is never an encouraging sign).
But the truly bad news is that there’s no release date for the second half of the book. Yes, the author who will likely never finish the book series that launched him to super stardom (the last Fire and Ice book published was Dance of Dragons in 2011) doesn’t have any idea when the second half of the prequel that HBO is investing millions of dollars in will be complete.
Sound familiar?
Fans of the Fire and Ice books long ago abandoned any hope they’ll see the final books in the series. They greet headlines that the next one is “just around the corner” with exasperated eye rolls. After all, they’ve been hearing that for a decade now.
Just to add some context to how long it’s been since the world saw a Fire and Ice book, Dance of Dragons was released the same year Game of Thrones premiered on TV. Producers were reasonably confident that by the time the show caught up to the books (one book usually equaled one season), Martin would have at least published one more entry in the series. Maybe he could have even completed the saga. But as season six drew nearer, it became painfully clear that another book wasn’t on the horizon. So producers were left with the task of completing the story using Martin’s notes as reference (it appears that the fate everyone’s favourite Mother of Dragons suffered was indeed the one Marin intended all along).
All eight seasons of the show aired, complete with several lengthy production breaks (including one that was over a full year) since the publication of the last book.
And fans won’t hesitate to tell you that even though Game of Thrones had its fair share of problems, it really started to stumble when it no longer had any books to anchor it. The plot meandered recklessly, entire storylines were forgotten altogether and characters became someone else entirely (after running entire cities and orchestrating entire kingdoms, Tyrion couldn’t tie his shoes after season six). You can bet dollars to doughnuts the same thing will happen to House of the Dragon.
As of yet there is no idea what kind of book to TV formula it will have. Martin apparently cut Fire and Blood in half but if HBO believes they have another cash cow on their hands, they’ll try to squeeze as many seasons out of it as they can. Which means once they run out of stuff that Martin has actually written, they’ll be right back to where they were with Fire and Ice; writing it on their own using Martin’s notes.
Besides, the biggest reason people tuned into the final season of GoT (the series finale attracted record numbers for HBO, despite widespread fan disappointment in season eight as a whole) was to see how the whole thing would end. What would happen with the Night King and his army of the dead? Would Cersei suffer the mercilessly grotesque fate she so richly deserved? Would the Hound get revenge on his monster of a brother? Would the surviving Starks get to live happily ever after? And most importantly, who would be sitting on the Iron Throne when all the dust cleared?
But as far as The House of the Dragon is concerned, we already know the end. There’s no mystery. No unanswered questions. No suspense. No point. Why invest any kind of time or emotion in something when you already know how it ends?
Perhaps HoD will be a success. Perhaps HBO will have another high fantasy hit on its hands and all of this will be moot. But right now the show has mountains of obstacles stacked against it, the least of which is complete viewer disinterest (disinterest that was once red-hot hatred). A lot of people may indeed tune in, possibly just out of curiosity. But the odds of them sticking around aren’t great.
But if House of the Dragon does become a hit despite the enormous odds stacked against it, then HBO needs to give the show runners responsible an enormous raise.
Because they’ll be responsible for nothing short of a miracle.
Image via editorials.rottentomoatoes.com
