Not Even The Sky is The Limit For Season 2 of HOUSE OF THE DRAGON, Says Showrunner Ryan Condal

By BILL HARRIS Special to The Lede Who’s counting dragons in HBO’s HOUSE OF THE DRAGON? Apparently a lot of people are, including showrunner, co-creator, writer, and executive producer Ryan Condal. During a press conference setting up Season 2 of HOUSE OF THE DRAGON, which debuts Sunday, June 16, only on Crave, Condal was asked for an updated tally on the fire-breathers. How many new ones can be expected in the new season? “I think I promised five, and I think it’s still correct,” said Condal, clearly going through a mental checklist. “I said five a year and a half ago, and I think I’m sticking to it. So, five new ones that you haven’t seen before.” Despite the promise of more creatures, Condal is well aware that the emotional pull of his series goes well beyond the special effects. “The things that I’m proudest of in the show are often when there are two characters in a room, in conflict with one another,” he said. “You’re making eight episodes (in Season 2), which amounts to probably about nine hours of television, end to end. You can’t fill it all with dragons fighting each other.” HOUSE OF THE DRAGON, which aired its 10-episode first season in 2022, is a prequel series to HBO’s GAME OF THRONES, which ran from 2011 to 2019, and was one of the most acclaimed series in the history of television. All existing seasons of both shows are available for streaming on Crave, and it was just announced that HOUSE OF THE DRAGON has already been renewed for a third season. HOUSE OF THE DRAGON portrays the dramatic events leading up to the decline of House Targaryen, with a vast ensemble cast that includes Emma D’Arcy as Queen Rhaenyra Targaryen, Matt Smith as Prince Daemon Targaryen (both proud members of what has become known as Team Black), Olivia Cooke as Queen Alicent Hightower, and Tom Glynn-Carney as King Aegon II Targaryen (Team Green), and many more. “My anxiety in Season 1 was, ‘is anybody going to watch the show?’ ” Condal admitted. “Because you’re following the Beatles – the most successful television show of all time. How do you follow that? You don’t. You just try to make something good that stands on its own. That was the challenge in Season 1. I think there are less nerves going into Season 2, but now we also have to kind of outdo ourselves, because that’s the expectation set before us. How do you do that?” Pressed for hints about upcoming epic battles in Season 2, Condal said, “well, I can’t talk about those yet. But we have two sequences that we did this year that are, I think, the biggest thing certainly I’ve ever been a part of, and the show as well, that kind of outstrip just the size and scale of anything we did in Season 1.” That’s quite a statement. As for the storytelling in Season 2, Condal said it’s more linear than it was in Season 1, simply due to the nature of the tale, and the general parameters of the source material from author George R.R. Martin. “It was a great challenge structuring Season 1, and really, it was less sort of figuring out the ‘time jumps,’ as they’ve come to be called, but more like, how do you cover 20 years of story and history in 10 episodes of a brand-new television show and expect everybody to follow it?” Condal explained. “Now in Season 2, I think this is very much traditional, serialized storytelling, where it’s all happening in real time, and we kind of move from episode to episode. It’s exciting, because it’s a way of keeping momentum moving, and building excitement, and all those things. There were challenges definitely to Season 2, but I think Season 1 was a particular narrative pretzel, and I don’t know that we need to do that again.” Narrative pretzels notwithstanding, Condal still marvels at the lushness and detail of HOUSE OF THE DRAGON, and GAME OF THRONES before it. “They’re just incredibly well-crafted stories and characters – it always goes back to the characters for me with that world,” Condal said. “And I think if you were to move slightly beyond that, I would just say that the world is so textural, and well realized, that it feels real. And that helps inform all of the sets, and the banners, and the costumes. It does feel like it actually happened in a lot of ways, particularly to me, who lives it every day.” billharristv@gmail.com @billharris_tv