HBO has brought George RR Martin back to the small screens with House of the Dragon just over three years after Game of Thrones came to an ending.
On Sunday, the second episode aired on HBO and HBO Max, but some critics have had access to the first six shows of the ten-episode season.
But what do they say? The TV show has drawn mixed reviews, with some saying that it is true to GoT’s epic glory while others believe it is duller than its successful predecessor.
With a score of 83% by critics and 85% by the audience on Rotten Tomatoes, it debuted with a fairly high level of acceptance. House of the Dragon is a prequel to Game of Thrones and takes place 172 years before the birth of Daenerys Targaryen.
The show takes Westeros viewers 200 years before the events they were familiar with and tells how a brutal civil war wiped out the Targaryen dynasty and Daenerys’ ancestors.
The author, George RR Martin, watched the first nine episodes of House of the Dragon, based on the second half of his 2018 book “Fire & Blood,” and said he was a fan of the show.
The Guardian gave the prequel four stars in its review, calling it a “roaring success.”
“In short, all is as it was in GoT’s heyday. Fun, propulsive, looking great and sounding passable. And that, after the bizarrely poor finale to what had been a roaring success of a show, is a relief,” it added.
The Wall Street Journal agreed, saying the show is “a success dramatically, as captivating as any season of Game of Thrones.” The LA Times had similar comments and stated that House of the Dragon “recaptures the power, grandeur of the original.”
However, others seem to be less enthusiastic about what the season’s first few episodes bring. The New York Times criticized its lineup, arguing that it was “stamped out on Martin’s production line of medieval fantasy types.”
Empire says the writing lacks sparkle and surprising character reveal moments, while Rolling Stones finds the characters “uniformly dull.”
However, nostalgic GoT fans hope that House of the Dragon will escalate and bring more excitement as it nears its end — expected to be catastrophic but interesting like its predecessor.
For the audience, House of the Dragon is gruesome yet captivating and has all the elements most GoT fans are looking for: dragons, betrayal, broken promises, fights, festering wounds, severed limbs, sensitive sex scenes, and even historical violence.
As a result, its first episode, “The Heris of the Dragon,” drew almost 10 million viewers, the biggest audience for any new original series in HBO’s history.
