‘House of the Dragon’ Showrunner Confronts George R.R. Martin Tension, Says He Became ‘Unwilling to Acknowledge’ Show’s Limits
“House of the Dragon” showrunner Ryan Condal addressed his creative tension with “Game of Thrones” author and creator George R.R. Martin in a recent interview, saying it began behind-the-scenes of the HBO fantasy series because Martin became “unwilling to acknowledge the practical issues at hand.”
Condal’s comments were made in an interview with Entertainment Weekly published Monday to coincide with the start of production on “House of the Dragon” Season 3. It has been months since Martin published last September a contentious, quickly-deleted blog post criticizing Condal and the show’s leadership over their past and planned changes to his source material, and even longer since “House of the Dragon” Season 2 went off the air in early August.
Condal said Monday that he did not read Martin’s post but remarked that it was “disappointing” to learn about it from others. “I will simply say I’ve been a fan of ‘A Song of Ice and Fire’ for almost 25 years now, and working on the show has been truly one of the great privileges of, not only my career as a writer, but my life as a fan of science-fiction and fantasy,” Condal began. “George himself is a monument, a literary icon in addition to a personal hero of mine, and was heavily influential on me coming up as a writer.”
The “House of the Dragon” showrunner then offered some insight into how his and Martin’s initially “fruitful” creative collaboration on the “Game of Thrones” prequel turned sour. “I made every effort to include George in the adaptation process. I really did. Over years and years. And we really enjoyed a mutually fruitful, I thought, really strong collaboration for a long time,” Condal revealed. “But at some point, as we got deeper down the road, he just became unwilling to acknowledge the practical issues at hand in a reasonable way.
“I think as a showrunner, I have to keep my practical producer hat on and my creative writer, lover-of-the-material hat on at the same time,” he continued. “At the end of the day, I just have to keep marching not only the writing process forward, but also the practical parts of the process forward for the sake of the crew, the cast and for HBO, because that’s my job.”
Condal added that he hopes he and Martin can one day “rediscover” their previous collaborative “harmony,” but declined to talk about the issue further.
The showrunner did, however, address one of Martin’s criticisms of “House of the Dragon” Season 2, namely the absence of Maelor Targaryen, the canonical third son of Queen Helaena Targaryen (Phia Saban). Martin insisted last year that Maelor’s absence would greatly lessen the logic and emotional impact of future events of the show, and he pointed to it as one of many changes the “House of the Dragon” creative team had erroneously made in order to limit the show’s cast size, budget and narrative scope.
Regarding Maelor’s absence from the series, Condal told EW, “There’s nothing we do on the show without talking it through and thinking about it very deeply for usually many months, if not years. I will just say that the creative decisions that we make in the show all flow through me, every single one of them, and this is the show that I want to make and believe, as a fan of ‘Fire & Blood’ and a deep reader of this material, it is the adaptation that we should be making to not only serve ‘Fire & Blood,’ but also a massive television audience.”
In the same interview, Condal spoke candidly about the difficulties of both managing the show’s inevitable budgetary constraints and adapting “Fire & Blood,” the fictional 2018 historical text that serves as the guiding source material for “House of the Dragon.” “It’s this incomplete history and it requires a lot of joining of the dots and a lot of invention as you go along the way,” Condal said of the Martin-penned novel.
“There’s been no television show in history that ever said, ‘We have too much money and too much time to make this,'” he additionally noted about the HBO drama’s budget. “You’re always making decisions as you go along as to, how are we going to use the resources we have right now to tell the best story we can possibly tell?”
Martin famously wanted “Game of Thrones,” HBO’s immensely successful predecessor to “Dragon,” to run for several seasons longer than it ultimately did, an idea that those involved with “Thrones” have deemed unfeasible. Based on how the final season of “Thrones” was received, though, many fans would likely take Martin’s side on that debate. Notably, the “House of the Dragon” Season 2 finale was not received well, either.
Whether or not Condal and his team will be able to put the series back on a track that fans are happy with remains to be seen. Either way, the battle taking place behind-the-scenes of “Dragon” seems to be similar to the one that unfolded throughout the final seasons of “Thrones” — namely, how many changes can be made and how much Martin’s signature, expansive style of storytelling can be sized down before it becomes dramatically unsuccessful.
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