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House of the Dragon
2022 · TV series · 3 seasons
Created by George R.R. Martin, Ryan J. Condal
Science FictionFantasyDramaActionAdventure
The Targaryen dynasty is at the absolute apex of its power, with more than 15 dragons under their yoke. Most empires crumble from such heights. In the case of the Targaryens, their slow fall begins when King Viserys breaks with a century of tradition by naming his daughter Rhaenyra heir to the Iron Throne. But when Viserys later fathers a son, the court is shocked when Rhaenyra retains her status as his heir, and seeds of division sow friction across the realm.
8 positive6 negative1 mixed19 neutralfrom 34 commenters
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36 comments on Hacker News
The game of thrones accents are pretty cringe though, leaning way too hard on the "dark featured eastern beauty with an unintelligible accent" trope whenever there is a brothel scene. I'm glad they realized this was stupid and had Myseria unceremoniously drop much of her fake accent for Season 2 House of the Dragon.
When talking about new, great content, parent mentioned only sci-fi and fantasy content: Marvel TV Shows, Wheel of Time, Foundation, House of the Dragon, the Mandalorian, Rings of Power, etc
So, it seemed that if you are into that stuff, you have some amazing content. But what if you are not?
I wish I had a way to quantify it, but it also seems like _investment_ has skyrocketed. 20 years ago HBO might make a high quality, high budget show. Now we have shows like the Marvel TV Shows, Wheel of Time, Foundation, House of the Dragon, the Mandalorian, Rings of Power, etc.. that all have MASSIVE budgets. A lot of that was funded by free money, but I think the quality and expectation of TV shows has gone up quite a bit.
Scammed them by downloading an illegal copy of a TV series?
It was House of the Dragon, I'm certain HBO don't offer any official downloads from third parties.
Plus, the listing showed photos of DVD covers and make it look like I was buying physical copies.
Look at the link I posted above, loads of people complaining about the exact same thing.
So yes, getting me to pay for a pirated/unofficial copy of something is a scam.
The streaming economy is shotgun malinvestment into the arts.
The subscriber pays a flat rate for unlimited choice within the catalog. They're not paying for the media they think they like the most. While technically the streamer is on the hook for this, they have competing optimization criteria - churn, hours viewed, etc.
The platform pours money into a lot of experiments. Platforms optimize for revenue and retention, get signals based on hours viewed, etc., yet none of this directly maps to satisfaction. Viewers will often mindlessly play stuff in the background. Expensive content reduces the number of cheap experiments that can be run. Weird stuff is long tail.
The old model of paying for what we think we'll enjoy was a better match that resulted in much higher quality film and prestige television.
I'd pay for House of the Dragon and The Last of Us. I'd probably pay $50 - $100 for each good TV show. I don't want the rest of it.
In my ideal world I pay creators directly with an upfront deposit. If I watch certain percentages of the show or film, they get a percentage of that deposit. I'd gladly pay a lot more for content this way.
New content should be paid for directly, à la carte. Old content should be streamed.
That's actually a good example - The early seasons aren't necessarily worse because of the end of the show, but it definitely killed a few spinoff shows HBO was planning, and also killed the Star Wars movie that the showrunners were working on.
Obviously we're still getting House of the Dragon, but if you'd told me before the last season came out that we'd only have 1 spinoff GoT show now, and that it wasn't that big of a deal, I'm not sure I'd have believed you.
> Seinfeld is one of the few sitcoms where a female character is as flawed as the men. You couldn't even do that show today.
It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia? Succession? Yellow Jackets? The Righteous Gemstones? Beef? White Lotus? House of The Dragon?
You could argue about percentages but it is in fact extremely easy to do a show with flawed female characters today.
> You'd think people would have learned after the mess with Game of Thrones.
Given how ridiculously dark House of the Dragon was in some episodes, with the entire season only set in candlelight, I don't think they've learned anything.
> the culture that made those days happen
Literally one movie, that was an unexpected hit is your contender for better culture?
In 2001 the highest grossing movie was Harry potter, and right below lord of the rings was monsters inc and jurasic park.
In 2002 Lord of the rings, Harry potter, Spiderman
in 2003 lord of the rings, matrix,nemo and pirates of the caribean.
Like how is that any different to now when you have pirates, spiderman, some children disney movie and fantastic beats which is just more harry potter?
> the old skills are no longer there.
Dune had more practical effects than lord of the rings. In 2001 the TV golden age had not started. Shows like the sopranos and the wire where struggling to find an audience. Friends and CSI reigned. Nowadays House of the Dragon and Last of US two high quality shows, with good use of practical effects are doing better than comparable mediocre daytime tv.
Even blockbusters are in many ways better. Andor is a million times better than anything from the 2000s prequels.
Isn’t The Last of Us currently one of the most popular shows on television right now? Its live viewership has continued to grow with each episode.
Episode 1: 0.588 million
Episode 7: 1.083 million
For comparison, House of the Dragon ended the season with 1.855 million.
Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2023/03/03/the-last-of-us-viewership-has-nearly-doubled-since-episode-1/
The ratings are also worth looking at: https://www.ratingraph.com/tv-shows/the-last-of-us-ratings-103573/
So I don’t think your assessment necessarily holds water.
It doesn't seem dated because it was one of the first movies to digitally alter the color palette. 80's and 90's movies have a natural palette because they were done on film.
Modern movies have a blue/orange palette, which is full display in House of the Dragon. It's as awful as that green/red two strip Technicolor used in the 1930s.
We started watching House of the Dragon, and stopped because it was impossible to see anything on the TV in our bedroom with any ambient lights. Only way to watch is on our basement home theater setup which allows us to black out the environment. It's ridiculous. When we watched the GoT final episodes we had to wait until after dark to watch them.
Back in the 80s we had films that were in color. These days, films are all in blue and orange. The blue and orange looks as bad as the 1930s two-strip technicolor, where the palette was green and red.
Case in point: House of the Dragon. The beautiful sets and costumes are all hard to enjoy when it's all drab blue and orange. Take a look at the picture:
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2022/sep/15/house-of-the-dragon-game-of-thrones
This happens in movie after movie after movie.
I just started House of the Dragon a few days ago. I was a huge ASOIAF fan and followed GoT pretty obsessively, so I was kind of surprised that I had basically no interest in House of the Dragon when it first came out.
I was talking to my wife about the show and had the (somewhat obvious in retrospect) realization that I was hesitant to watch HotD because of how horrible GoT mangled the story. The best seasons of Thrones were the seasons which closely followed the books - around season 5 the series really started to go off the rails. It was still fun to watch, but lost some of the initial magic as soon as it didn't have the books to use as a plot template. And by the time it made its way to the final two seasons, it was pretty clear that there was going to be no righting of the ship in the amount of time they had left.
Even with that being the case, it was absolutely impressive how badly they managed to flop the landing of the series. The last season was wildly disappointing to me. And in fact, I think the TV series poisoned my love of the books to some degree. I'm pretty skeptical that GRRM will ever finish and some of the plot points of the end of the TV series seem so wrongheaded to me that I'm not sure how George could ever land the books more successfully.
HotD has been entertaining enough so far, although a bit slow for my taste. We'll have to see how things shake out over the next few years, but at least now my expectations are pretty level.
I have never stopped pirating since I got internet. My TV provider gives me Netflix, I have HBO Max through a sweet deal, amazon because of the delivery and Disney because a friend share the account, yet I still download all the shows I want, for example, I downloaded House of the Dragon week after week while I watched it on HBO Max, I think the only episode I watched pirated was the leaked one.
Why? Because I automated this process along time ago and also because I know sooner or later I am going to stop paying for that and this way I am prepared for it, because I don't have Apple or Rakuten, or many others. Because I have my own library of stuff (paid, and pirated) that goes back decades and I can access it from anywhere in the world.
The artists' intent argument doesn't hold up, but is one that continues to be used as justification for "tradition". Most people aren't watching movies strictly in IMAX or even a color calibrated TV. Most default TV settings, even on the most high end devices, have things like dynamic saturation and motion smoothing on by default. The most popular brands of headphones do have custom eq from the factory, most people don't listen to studio monitor style flat audio. Most people don't realize there is a difference.
The meaning of art is up to the viewer, not the artist. There's nothing wrong with having a preference, like using things like temporal denoising or increasing/decreasing saturation. Even an IMAX movie theater isn't enough because that's not what the film was graded with. Pretending that art shouldn't be modified because it moves away from the artist's intent is a bad faith argument. There were certain House of Dragon color grading decision that made me feel very disappointed, and I was watching in Dolby Vision on a nice high dynamic range TV.
Artists' intent is useless if 99.999% of the population can't enjoy the actual art.
https://www.vulture.com/article/why-house-of-the-dragon-episode-7-driftmark-was-so-dark.html
Streaming is in an interesting place because a lot of the big hits (at least from my POV) are now such lavish productions that like movies, their sequels do not necessarily arrive year after year. So The White Lotus, House of the Dragon, and Andor (of Disney+) are being filmed in 2023, and will not be returning until 2024.
It's an interesting scheduling situation- so they're going to have to put out new content to fill the void in the meantime for the fans of such shows who have nothing to look forward to for an entire year, to keep them from unsubscribing.
This may be an unpopular opinion, but I wish networks/services would stop trying to make safe bets with new screen adaptations of classic books and movies. Some of the worst TV I've watched this year has been adaptations of classic books/movies (Foundation, LOTR) and some of the best has been new content (Severance, Raised by Wolves, House of the Dragon).
https://www.theverge.com/2022/10/3/23386058/house-of-the-dragon-episode-7-too-dark-compression-my-eyes
Will a soundbar help me understand accents? That is my main problem. Almost every show I watch has heavy accents for flair (fantasy) or because it was cheaper to do with non-US actors (action). I either have to watch with subs and miss the beautiful shots because I'm reading or rewind a couple times per episode when I can't get something.
Off the top of my head - Northman, just watched it today, great movie, definitely stuff I didn't understand. House of the Dragon. Peripheral. It really feels like every show now.
Well, if we're talking about "House of the Dragon", there were a few episodes where they attempted day-for-night [1] production and did a horrible, horrible job of it. This particular f*ckup has little to do with monitor capability or dynamic range, and everything to do with poor judgment through multiple stages of the production pipeline. I honestly don't know how such a high budget production ends up with these shots.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Day_for_night
>They were also mad that one of their distribution partners last week leaked the finale of House of the Dragon early
I used to work for one of the companies supporting studios getting their content to streamers. This specific story is related to iTunes, but it's easy to do for any of them. The early days of "ramping up" meant putting butts in seats to do the work before automation was in place. The push to automate shot to highest priority when on of the butts in seats incorrectly copy/paste from one spreadsheet to the next which allowed an episode to be downloaded before it aired to anyone that subscribed to that season on iTunes.
The fallout from that was incredible, but credit to the company they did not fire the employee for making a human mistake.
I'm mildly hard of hearing and the poor audio mixes in movies and shows are very difficult for me. For example with House of the Dragon, there is no volume where I can understand all the words in quiet conversations without blowing my ears out in battle scenes. Fiddling with the volume constantly is annoying. I've looked for dynamic volume features, but my TV doesn't have them and I'm not interested in a new TV or sound system.
So it's subtitles — especially for shows with poor audio mixes, where people whisper, talk quietly, or with heavy accents.
Looking through and old tabloid newspaper from the early '80s I was amazed to see that the TV listings was just a bare half page showing the names of the programmes, and that was it. Nowadays you have endless recommendations and reviews of what's coming up, and endless analysis of what's been on (e.g. just last night was reading the House Of The Dragon episode recap in the Guardian). What was most striking is that I don't remember TV being so low-key in the culture, nor how it crept up in importance, despite living through the change. Edit: Briton here.
I’ve seen some episodes of House of the Dragon too. I have never read the books. So the black characters may have been shoehorned in. I have no idea. But a bunch of stuff has happened. Definitely a better show.
Amazon may as well have attempted to rewrite chapters of the Bible and sell it to the south. "Just give it a chance!"
Given the licensing constraints I truly don't know why they didn't just remake Lord of the Rings into a TV show. Rewriting background stories for established characters is a fools errand.
I'm curious about the differing fortunes between "Rings of Power" and "House of the Dragon." The "Rings of Power" peaked at episode 1 (7.4) on IMDB, and has been declining with every new episode. Compare this to "House of the Dragon" which seems to be picking up momentum, and the most recent episode was rated extremely well (9.1). Both of these shows cater to audiences with strong opinions set in established worlds.
Go look at fan forums for House of the Dragon, discussing the most recent episode. There was an incest scene and the gist of fan reaction was "hnnnng that's hot".
>Clunky got prequels
House of the Dragon has surprisingly been great, sure you have the random teleporting character or out of character military tactic but it also shows HBO learned from their mistake and you can feel they brought back the politics and meetings and focus on characters instead of fan service and whatever made the last 4 got seasons the garbage they turned into.
But again you have to have read GRRM's work and not be a contrarian just for the sake of it to enjoy it.
Rings of power had a budget of a billion $, either there is some money laundering scheme at work that I'm unaware of, or people have just forgotten how to hire good writers and other people to make a decent movie/series.
If you gave me a billion $ today I'd just hire Peter Jackson, pay him a shit ton of money so he accepts, and give him FULL creative power over the project so it doesn't turn out like The Hobbit trilogy or That Raimi directed Dr Strange in the multiverse of madness. And if he refuses to do it then find another good director and I'm sure there are a lot of big names who would gladly accept the challenge of topping Jackson's work.
A billion $ is A LOT of money in cinema, despite you having to pay the movie theaters, marketing, etc. Amazon owns imdb so can market it themselves on 2 of the most visited websites in the world: Amazon and imdb (for movie/series watchers), and if that's not enough, they own the streaming service where they plan to put it.
People aren't saying it sucks (at least I'm not) but that it had no reason to not be great. Galadriel felt inhuman in Jackson's movies, she's supposed to be one of the fairest and mightiest elves in middle earth, I doubt she felt like that to anyone in rop.
Now after all this rant: I didn't watch rings of power, and I don't plan to, why soil a good memory and good mental mythos I have of that world? I made that mistake with the witcher, I had built up the characters in my head from the books and later the videogames, then Netflix took a huge dump on this mental model, and now whenever I think about some character (outside of Cavill and a few others who did great work) I also get the image of the new one in my head: I hope this weird rambling makes sense.
Mhhh yeah it was. But the real collapse in quality with Wheel of Time started with Episode 4 and got worse with every single episode.
In total Wheel of Time was terrible, and didn't look good. Rings at least has some good visuals.
Lets hope Rings gets better. Sadly for now it looks like both shows will end up rated button tier.
At least House of the Dragon and The Sandman didn't disappoint.
That “sink or float” metaphor was clumsily written and reminded me of someone wanting to convey something important, but didn’t know how or what to say. I’ve only watched one episode, but that episode was not good.
In contrast House of the Dragon is better written, equally gorgeous, and is far more interesting. At least it is 3 episodes in compared to the 1 RoP I’ve seen.
Wtf are you talking about, the pilot of Breaking Bad was a great hook and draws people in. It sets up the world amazingly well.
Also, this is a 1h show, so you have 2 hours, that is the length of a full movie. And people review movies all the time.
People also reviewed the first to episodes of House of the Dragon.
If I exclude the credits both episodes are almost exactly 60 minutes long. And the credits are ~5 minutes or so, so the displayed runtime is 1 hour and a few minutes. I have no idea where you get the 90 minutes from, that is simply not true.
I have watched both Rings of Power and The House of the Dragon, and both are essentially setting up the story in the first two episodes. There is plot in those episodes of course, but a lot is setting up characters and places and the world in general.
> I don't get reviews saying that TRoP, or some other new prestige TV series, is "terrible", or "a disaster", based on the first couple of episodes.
There are only eight episodes, so if two first two suck then that's a quarter of the series/seasons that sucks.
The first two episodes are also 90 minutes long, so we're three hours into the story. That's as long as the extended edition of The Fellowship of the Ring movie: how much of a story were they able to tell in that? How much have they told in TRoP?
Contrast with with House of the Dragon which has also released two episodes (out of ten). What are people saying about that?
Yes, the series can be 'saved' in the remaining six episodes, but it just seems… wasteful? (of time, effort, money) … to do what they did.
Yeah, things should get interesting when the first model makes use of Rings of Power or House of the Dragon footage or whatever the latest superhero movie is.
I wonder if we'll see a "Hollywood vs Silicon Valley" lobbying battle. Or possibly "Amazon media division vs Amazon AI division"...
> dropping a new episode of House of Dragon tonight ... at a specific time must require far more interesting tech than whatever usage patterns the latest episode of 90 Day Fiancee necessitates.
HBO Max crashes for thousands during ‘House of the Dragon’ premiere: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/08/22/hbo-max-crash
Even on TV, HBO retroactively edited out George Bush's head from the spikes Joffrey makes Sansa look at in season one of Game of Thrones, all the way back in 2011. George Martin just joked about it in his interview on the upcoming House of the Dragon.