That HBO followed up the miserablist fantasy epic, “Game of Thrones,” a pop culture phenomenon that it was, with the prequel series “House of the Dragon,” which manages the nigh-impossible feat of making its parent program look cheery by comparison, was preordained. Partly, there’s a narrative logic to the decision: audiences saw the ultimate outcome of generational feudal conflicts in “Game of Thrones,” so a history lesson is in order. Mostly, though, “House of the Dragon” is informed by the demands of franchise maintenance. The joylessness of the show’s characters seems consequent to a joylessness that is also reflected in the production itself; nobody’s having fun, regardless of which side of the camera they’re standing on.
If “House of the Dragon” had to be a dour slog through overtures repeated from the original series, at least we can enjoy a consolation prize in “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms,” a miniseries set in the world of Westeros, derived from George R.R. Martin’s “Tales of Dunk and Egg” novellas: small stories written with humble intentions and, thank mercy, a goddamn sense of humor. The show isn’t an out-and-out comedy, of course; no Westerosi saga could be. This is a land that’s as pitiless as it is cursedly stratified, where the former and latter feed into one another in an ouroboros of barbarity cosplaying as nobility. All the same, showrunner Ira Parker and co-producer-cum-director Owen Harris open their pilot episode, “The Hedge Knight,” with a classic visual gag snatched right out of the toilet joke canon: the sight of their leading man taking a ferocious dump behind a tree.
It’s fun to interpret the shot as Parker thumbing his nose at the unintended comic self-seriousness baked into “House the Dragon,” a quality that might have dogged “Game of Thrones” if not for the outrage sparked by its final episodes. (“Outrage” is generous; to be aggrieved by that show’s ending is to reveal one did not pay much mind to its preceding seasons.) Whatever else Parker meant with his choice in scatological comedy, watching erstwhile rugby player Peter Claffey dramatize abrupt defecation helps put “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms” in its proper context. Where the preceding adaptations of Martin’s work have centered on royal families, palace intrigue, and political alliances, “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms” instead takes interest in commoners’ lives and commoners’ concerns; and when you’re a peasant in a medieval period environment, you aren’t guaranteed the luxury of privacy, much less contemporaneous plumbing, when nature calls.
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In other words, “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms” begins with a truly puerile punchline that gives the show grounding precisely where it must be: the other side of HBO’s fantasy lens, the unglamorous, ugly, and overwhelmingly bleak world inhabited by the subjects of Westeros’ various ruling houses, those Baratheons and Targaryens and Lannisters, and the list goes on. (And honestly, if King Henry II could have a royal flatulist, and if Shakespeare could get away with writing fart jokes into Othello, then don’t we in 2026 deserve to laugh at a grown man popping an inglorious squat?) Those houses are named, of course, and represented by characters and roles both great and small, but Parker’s focus is on Claffey, who expresses the lowborn hedge knight Duncan, or “Dunk,” or Ser Duncan the Tall, height being his only immediately recognizable characteristic, as a genial sweetie pie who does not so much cling to romantic ideals about knighthood as he suffers to embody them.
Duncan kicks us off by burying Ser Arlan (Danny Webb), his mentor, who expires in “The Hedge Knight’s” first few minutes but shows up in flashbacks and dreams throughout the miniseries’ six episodes. It’s a painful moment, a heartbreaking moment, but a galvanizing one, too, that sets him on the road to Ashford, a respectable enough burg playing host to a jousting tournament, on which he pins his dreams of establishing himself as a knight. Would that it were so simple; the temptation of crossing lances is too great to resist for mightier warriors, like Lyonel Baratheon (Daniel Ings), and of course a fleet of Targaryens, including the ever gracious Baelor (Bertie Carvel), heir to the Iron Throne, his brother Maekar (Sam Spruell), decidedly less gracious, and Maekar’s sons, Daeron (Henry Ashton) and Aerion (Finn Bennett).
For those fluent in “Game of Thrones” lingo, Daeron acts more like a Baratheon, while Aerion better fits the Targaryen standard set in “Game of Thrones” as well as “House of the Dragon”: he’s an utter monster. But Duncan makes his reputation his mission, so at first none of the names mean as much as his lack of one; there’s also the matter of Egg (Dexter Sol Ansell), the pipsqueak stableboy who decides to tag along and inveigle his way into service as Duncan’s squire. Duncan may not have fame or even infamy, and he might eat salt beef for basically every meal, but it beats cleaning horse stalls. Where the show finds conflict is in the inevitable collision of Duncan with the Targaryens, and with other knights likewise competing for glory, and especially the tension between the sense of duty and honor bestowed on him by his title and his wish for success. It’s hard to be good, to be a knight, in a land where words are cheap, and titles are thus cheapened.
“A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms” could easily lose itself in grimdark navelgazing about the meaning of honor, a subject core to “Game of Thrones” and ripe for revisitation in 2026, a year that to date has been defined by government-sanctioned violence unfettered by such vestiges of civilized society as “due process” or “checks and balances.” But Parker, like Duncan, appears to believe in honor as an ideal not only to embrace but also to embody. When “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms” takes its audience to dark, sobering places, a light shines at the end of the tunnel; if the story encourages honor, it also advocates for hope. When members of the ruling class flaunt authority unchecked against their people, there are those, both among the masses and occupying the same chambers of power, who will resist tyranny.
Parker and Martin aren’t Pollyanna types, and for that matter, neither is Duncan: the creators and the creation recognize where the limits lie for those without power when they push back against the scumbags in charge. The outcome isn’t pretty; the glory Duncan seeks is tainted. But “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms” takes the bad of life in Westeros with the good, as bad as “the bad” ends up being, and Claffey’s performance brims with such sincere charm that it’s nearly impossible not to believe, as he and Egg both do, in the myth of chivalry; under harsh light the myth is disproven, but remains worth living up to anyways. This is, after all, a fantasy series. So cherish the fantasy as equally as the bowel evacuations. [B+]
