All four seasons of Succession took place over a period of about two years. The final season proceeds at a one-day-per-episode pace, and it accounts for just under two weeks in the lives of the Roys. On the other hand, the first season of House of the Dragon—HBO’s other prestige succession drama—covers nearly 20 years in eight episodes. That’s fast! So fast, in fact, that it necessitated replacing its two lead roles—the embattled heir Rhaenyra Targaryen and her frenemy-stepmother Alicent Hightower—midseason. There’s a towheaded baby in episode 4 who is an adult king by episode 8. The drawbacks to this gambit are obvious. Despite the excellence of all four actors playing our two leads—Milly Alcock and Emma D’Arcy as young and old Rhaenyra and Emily Carey and Olivia Cooke as young and old Alicent—the show’s narrative speed is a debilitating constraint. You can’t slow-play character development across three time jumps in eight hours.
All this first-season hustling, presumably, was done in the service of the new season we now have. Hurrying through all that table-setting, throwing child actors overboard as it went, would buy the second season the luxury of time. But, whether it’s because of the show’s deliberate narrowness of focus or because the show’s writers simply got used to that brisk and sketchy style, the new season struggles to match the depth of Game of Thrones. It is a gruesome, dour, often entertaining, recitation.
House of the Dragon takes place roughly a hundred years before the events of Game of Thrones, during a period of internecine palace intrigue known as “The Dance of the Dragons.” King Viserys Targaryen (Paddy Considine) has a daughter, but no male heirs. After his beloved wife dies in childbirth, he names his only daughter, Rhaenyra, heir. But, as we know, glass ceilings are hard to break, and the pending succession of a female monarch to the Iron Throne causes a tremendous amount of uproar across the kingdoms. In the meantime, Viserys takes a second wife, Alicent, who bears him several sons. Although he publicly holds to Rhaenyra as his successor, once Viserys dies, there’s a scramble, Alicent’s son Aegon (Tom Glynn-Carney) takes the throne, and Rhaenyra flees King’s Landing as the queen in exile. In the season’s dramatic finale, one of Alicent’s sons (accidentally?) kills one of Rhaenyra’s sons, and the civil war that had been long brewing seems, officially, to have begun.
