HBO’s new Game of Thrones spinoff series, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, is heading to our screens soon. But unlike the sprawling tales of Game of Thrones and House of the Dragon, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms draws on much more concise source material: George R.R. Martin’s series of novellas, Tales of Dunk & Egg. And so, though we were expecting A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms to resemble Game of Thrones’ past series outings in scale and runtime, we, alongside showrunner Ira Parker and author George R.R. Martin, were pleased to see HBO opt for half-hour-long episodes for this prequel story. When we spoke to Parker, here’s what he had to say about keeping the length of A Knight of the Seven Kingdom‘s episodes short.
Parker shared, “Look, it massively altered my approach. When HBO came to me with this, I assumed that we were going to do 10 episodes, each an hour long. When I heard that they didn’t have to be the case, that we could do six episodes, that we could do half-hour episodes for A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, it made me relax a little bit. Because obviously the novellas don’t have enough story for that, and you got to let the story lead. We’ve obviously brought up the characterizations, and we’ve added more to this world, and we’ve added just more fun and more color. That’s where we added rather than changed the story. So having a 30-minute runtime really allowed us to make as faithful an adaptation as possible to The Hedge Knight.”
When we confirmed the episode length for A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms was Parker’s choice, the showrunner emphatically said, “Oh yes!” But hastened to add, “Yes, it was brought up very mutually, as that, ‘This is going to be what’s appropriate for this show.’ And obviously, George R. R. Martin very much weighed in on this as well. He was very happy to do it this way. George R. R. Martin obviously talked about doing this as a movie, more appropriately, and I see why he said that, because that’s about how much you have just straight from beginning to end. So we got about double that. You know, a little bit of him, a little bit of us.”
It sounds like a happy meeting of the minds between George R. R. Martin and Ira Parker, and we love to see it. And keeping A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms‘s episodes that perfect half-hour length really paid off in the end, at least according to our experts at Nerdist dot com.
A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms and its short episodes air Sundays at 10pm PT/ET on HBO.