Week-to-Week: House of the Lord of Dragon Power Throne Rings
Reflections on the distinct sensation of watching and evaluating two fantasy spinoffs simultaneously
Look, it was always going to happen.
In the comments of my reviews of House of the Dragon and Zack Handlen’s reviews of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, Episodic Medium subscribers have inevitably framed their understanding of one show based on their experience of the other. From the moment HBO set their premiere date only a few weeks before Amazon’s staked-out weekend for the launch of their attempt to create “their own Game of Thrones,” this became a showdown, creating an inevitable online dialogue.
To be clear, though, I emphasize conversation as opposed to competition. In our age of non-linear viewership and streaming platforms that obscure real data, ratings have been an apples to oranges game, which isn’t even to mention that both HBO and Amazon are more concerned about subscriber churn than by the amount of people watching in a given week. And while certainly people have started to feel out which of the two shows they prefer if they’re watching both, the notion of hierarchy rings false less than halfway through their first seasons, even if the franchise’s existing reputations make it easier to “pick sides” than we would be with series not based on original I.P.1
When I was talking to my students this week about intertextuality, I realized that I don’t know if there’s even been an instance where one’s experience of a television show could be so shaped by a show they’re watching at the same time quite like this one. Even if they weren’t airing at the same time, they represent the most high-profile spinoffs in television history, each tasked with leveraging their respective franchises into a new era of platform posturing. The idea that they would be happening simultaneously is essentially data overload: the “Why” may be cynical, but the “How” doesn’t necessarily have to be, especially when we’re seeing two very different roadmaps on how to reintroduce viewers to fantasy universes.
I’ve written extensively on House of the Dragon’s approach, so I don’t want to belabor the point. The short version is that Ryan Condal—with the clear support and guidance of George R.R. Martin and with Thrones director Miguel Sapochnik as co-showrunner—is adapting a story chosen because it lets them play the “greatest hits” of Game of Thrones. From fiery dragons to forbidden lust, the show basically hit the ground running delivering on the spectacle that its predecessor frankly took a few seasons to warm up to. It narrows the scope of the series to a single family and their struggle to hold onto power, framed by the opening chyrons and a convenient retcon as both the origin story of Daenerys’ ancestors and the framework for what would become A Song of Ice and Fire.
The ultimate impact is that House of the Dragon has successfully simulated the experience of watching Game of Thrones, but not the experience of starting it. I don’t find myself flashing back to those early days in 2011, wide-eyed at the prospect of epic fantasy on this scale on TV. I’m flashing back to 2017, deep into Thrones’ run, familiar with its patterns. When I talk about spinoffs with my students, I always frame it in algebraic terms, with networks asking for “More of X.” Only three years after Game of Thrones finished its run, it was clear that HBO felt the best way to keep the fire burning was to engineer a show that would basically treat those years as a hiatus of sorts, like they’re a fast food restaurant discontinuing a menu item before making a big to-do about it making a comeback. It doesn’t taste as good as you remember it, but the ritual has a familiarity that isn’t quite nostalgia so much as the sense that you’re restoring a ritualized equilibrium to your television diet.
It’s been interesting to see how this choice has affected people’s perception of House of the Dragon, particularly its characters, but I’ve found myself gaining a new perspective on it while watching The Rings of Power go in an entirely different direction. Working in the margins of Tolkien’s existing writings, unable to directly adapt the Silmarillion, the show’s story set in Middle-earth’s Second Age has been constructed to do precisely what House of the Dragon is avoiding: trying to recreate the sensation of visiting this world for the first time. Whether it’s Galadriel bearing witness to the splendor of Númenor, Elrond descending into the land of Dwarves as they mine using unknown powers, or Nori watching as The Stranger searches for answers in the stars, Bear McCreary’s great score works overtime to sell us on the idea that we’re at the beginning of another unforgettable journey like the one we took two decades ago.2
The show’s relationship to nostalgia is a tricky one. On the one hand, the greater distance from the original text means that the show is more strongly asking us to place ourselves in a very different time in our lives, a reflective exercise that is potent but burdensome. On the other hand, however, it has the benefit of immortal elves at the core of its story, which means it can function as a literal prequel to characters we know, grounding it in ways unavailable to House of the Dragon. But the choice to present such a sprawling story means that they aren’t simply resting on their elvish laurels—Nori and the Harfoots may be spiritually linked to the Hobbits, but they’re their own thing to be discovered and understood, a sensation House of the Dragon has very little interest in by design.
It is, however, more or less mirroring the storytelling approach of the predecessor of its “competition,” as opposed to the movies it’s actually based on. While there are clear thematic and character connections to The Lord of the Rings, it notably lacks a quest narrative to link to either those films or the subsequent Hobbit trilogy. In those stories, Tolkien uses the quest structure as a way to plunge the viewer into this world, beginning with Hobbits before Frodo and Bilbo bring us deeper into the worlds of Elves, Dwarves, and Men, who often gain quests of their own. Here, though, Nori is certainly the closest to a traditional journey of discovery, but she’s still just fighting to keep up with the Harfoot caravan, far from fully embracing her desire to explore the world beyond their protective bubble. And rather than using her or any other character as our primary perspective before branching out into the story, the show is cross-cutting between them with abandon from the very beginning, much as Game of Thrones crossed the Narrow Sea and Beyond the Wall early in its run.
It’s a choice that gives Rings of Power easy access to an array of the emotional dimensions of our relationship to Lord of the Rings, albeit at the cost of a lot of points-of-view to juggle. Even Thrones consciously chose to start many of its characters together, establishing a status quo before scattering the Stark family across the continent. Although we did get a brief bit of convergence with Elrond and Galadriel, and we’ve learned Halbrand is the reluctant King of the Southlands where Arondir is battling the orcs, there’s a sprawl to this story that feels more like the middle seasons of Thrones where they tried and failed to make Dorne a going concern. This felt particularly true when the journey to Númenor introduced Elendil and Isildur, an entirely new node to this story that offers more flashes of recognition for viewers, but one more ball to juggle at a time when a drop could disrupt the integral process of onboarding viewers into a given series.
Placed in contrast to House of the Dragon’s choice to nearly eschew juggling altogether, it creates fascinating narrative trajectories heading into the rest of their seasons. In the case of Rings of Power, the question is whether they can keep all the balls in the air: it makes for a dynamic introduction as we piece together a larger story and each character’s place within it, but the burden of expectation will come to bear more swiftly, particularly if they’re too slow to address mysteries like the Stranger’s identity. The show’s ability to construct a story built on reintroducing us to Middle-earth from a range of perspectives is a powerful nostalgia engine, but it’s also a difficult narrative engine for a show to manage so early in its run.
For House of the Dragon, though, the question is whether the limited scale of storytelling will slow our investment to the point that our attention drifts. It may be engineered to deliver the spectacle we came to expect from Game of Thrones, but it’s frankly untested as to whether that can create the type of connection to characters that series relied on to build an audience. Thrones had nineteen episodes to build to its first “epic” battle, and its political dealings in King’s Landing were able to breathe alongside stories from across the continent and beyond.
All of this is to say that even isolated from one another, these two spinoffs are already in a complex dialogue with the franchise entries that came before them, but watching them together has inflected those conversations in fascinating ways. How differently would I be experiencing House of the Dragon’s distance from Game of Thrones’ opening episodes if Rings of Power wasn’t evoking their structure at the same time? Would the Thronesification of Lord of the Rings be less apparent if it was airing without the clear point of comparison? Would we be as focused on issues of tone if there wasn’t another show making a very different choice on the role of levity in their respective world?
The answers to these questions are, as is the nature of intertextuality, inherently personal. It’s not about the comparison between the two shows deciding which is objectively better, or even subjectively superior. It’s rather the idea that as we grapple with the admittedly messy reality of I.P.-fueled spinoffs of fantasy stories with fervent fanbases, the two shows are offering countless points of reference, filled with choices for us to compare and contrast, in the process being able to better articulate how we feel about each franchise and the underlying cultural project behind each installment. And while there’s more than enough going on in each show that our reviews here at Episodic Medium remain focused solely on the task at hand, I have no doubt any of us watching the two shows simultaneously is being shaped by that experience, as has been emerging in the great comment sections these past weeks.
Episodic Observations
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I finished up the ABC summer reality series Claim to Fame last week, and it really was a delight—a lot of it depends on finding casting to make “relatives of celebrities hide their identities” work, but the show did a great job of framing the various mysteries, and while the game balance was a bit of a challenge as we got to the end, it was hard to argue with the winner. If you’re unfamiliar, go read Joe Reid’s take on the show as the summer’s best at Decider.
I still have Rey Mysterio to watch, and I have to decide if I’m willing to stomach the Bella Twins installment, but I really enjoyed finishing out the WWE Legends Biography series on A&E with Wrestlemania I, which I watched a lot as a kid because my grandfather had the VHS. I hope they do more event-based Biographies, because they naturally lean less into hagiography, and instead into the cultural history of the industry.
I had lots of thoughts about this year’s Primetime Emmy Awards, but I channeled them into contributing to Rolling Stone’s breakdown of the Best, Worst, and WTF of the night, and a Twitter thread on the specifics of Jimmy Kimmel’s disruption of Quinta Brunson’s win for Comedy Writing. And if you’re a subscriber, it’s the topic of this week’s Episodic Discussion.
I remain very much Horror-averse as a moviegoer, but I’m being pushed out of my comfort zone a bit, and got talked into a screening of Barbarian knowing nothing about it but its genre—confirmed by AMC’s silly “Thrills and Chills” branding—and one actor in the cast. And I would argue this is precisely the best way to experience it, if you’re intending on seeing it.
LOL, remember when they let you make original shows not based on I.P.? Crazy, right?
And, yeah, I guess also like the one a decade later, but let’s not get into that for the time being.
Lovely read! Honestly, these types of musings are the other half of why I come to Episodic Medium beyond the reviews/episode analysis.
I don't have much to add here, but my own personal take is that I _love_ that these are both airing so close to each other and with such different takes on the genre and their source material. It makes for wildly interesting conversations, as long as you can weed out the crazies. And while I am sure that even if these series were viewed in a vacuum there would still be interesting conversation, having this additional layer to it all has just be the icing on the cake.
I'll admit that I'm more interested in following how House of the Dragon and Rings of Power are in conversation with Game of Thrones and Jackson's Lord of the Rings films, respectively, but there's no denying that even I have been looking at how the two end up being in conversation with each other. The thing that has jumped out to me with regards to their intertextuality has been looking to see how literally Rings of Power takes Jeff Bezos's order to get him his own Game of Thrones. After the initial announcement, there was concern amongst some Tolkien fans that meant that he wanted to add Game of Thrones's sexposition and ultraviolence to the comparatively chaste Middle-Earth. As it turns out, those fears have (so far) been unfounded, and the real influence of Game of Thrones has been a structural one; bouncing back and forth across a continent to follow a far flung cast of disparate characters, with each basically playing out their own narrative. What makes it so interesting to me is that Rings of Power is doing that right as House of the Dragon pulls away from that structure, focusing (so far) on one group of characters in pretty much one location.
It struck me from the start that Rings of Power was essentially fighting the previous war, aping elements of of Game of Thrones after HBO had realized those elements weren't necessarily replicable. And with good reason! That kind of storytelling is hard to do, from both a logistical and narrative perspective. The logistical part can be handled if you've got endless buckets of money you're willing to spend, but the narrative part will always be a trickier nut to crack. Once the structure of Rings of Power became clear, my biggest question became "how, when, and under what circumstances will all these various storylines come together?", because as Game of Thrones proved, tying everybody and everything together in a satisfactory manner is no small feat. Rings of Power does have going for it the fact that it is building to a preordained endgame with some preordained major events throughout, whereas Game of Thrones only had that to a certain point. I'm most curious to see which of those big events (if any) Rings of Power has planned for the end of season 1, because that will give me a better idea of how they are arcing the show and what the answer to those questions might be.