Best Television Series – Drama – Nominee
The Golden Globe-nominated TV drama series, House of the Dragon, focuses on events that took place 200 years before the epic story that unfolded in the original drama, Game of Thrones.
To someone unfamiliar with the world of the George R.R. Martin fantasy books, ‘A Song of Ice and Fire,’ the two tales seem to have little in common – until you meet the Targaryen family.
House of the Dragon charts the history of House Targaryen from the arrival in Westeros of King Aegon I Targaryen (aka Aegon the Conqueror), to the early days in the reign of King Aegon II Targaryen. The series begins with King Viserys Targaryen (Paddy Considine) already the fifth Targaryen King to sit on the Iron Throne and rule the Seven Kingdoms. After his wife dies in childbirth, he announces his only daughter, Princess Rhaenyra Targaryen (Milly Alcock/Emma D’Arcy) as his heir to the throne. After he remarries and has two sons, an internal succession war continues pitting Rhaenyra against her uncle, Prince Daemon (Matt Smith), her aunt, Princess Rhaenys Targaryen (Eve Best), and her two half-brothers.
What could have happened after this time of enormous influence by one family ended two centuries later with the Targaryen line not only losing the throne but also most of the Targaryens themselves, along with their dragons?
Show runner Ryan Condal, who co-created the show with George R.R. Martin, told a packed 2022 Comic Con panel, “I think the most compelling thing about this particular story is that it delves into the history of the Targaryen dynasty. We hear about that in the pages of ‘A Song of Ice and Fire,’ and the original series, Game of Thrones, but we never really get a real sense of it. In this series we begin at the absolute pinnacle of the dynasty, the height of power and wealth and influence. They have the most dragons that they’ll ever have, and it starts right before the bloom begins to come off the rose.”
Condal admits one of the biggest challenges of bringing the story to life was, in fact, the number of dragons that had to be depicted and portrayed in computer imagery. “There are 17 of them at the height of this period,” he tells the panel, “so it was really important to differentiate them, not only in the way they looked, but the way they behaved and acted and the way they bonded with their riders. A year before we started filming, we were working with a couple of conceptual designers and …George, who writes very detailed books, gave us the gift of specifying color and size and age. We’ve designed many tiers of dragons, all with such distinct personalities, and we had such a great time doing it, I think it shows.”