A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms debuts Sunday, January 18 at 10:00 p.m. ET/PT on HBO and will be available to stream on HBO Max. New episodes will debut on subsequent Sundays.
Although House of the Dragon largely stemmed the widespread fan disappointment caused by the final seasons of Game of Thrones, it has still generated its own share of frustrations that have kept it from being a full return to glory for HBO’s flagship franchise. A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms doesn’t aspire to be the franchise’s redeemer. Still, it is the most purely enjoyable and heartfelt excursion to Westeros in some time, and one that can serve as an entry point to the franchise for viewers who may feel they are too far behind on all the lore to join now.
Set almost 100 years before the events depicted in Game of Thrones and based on The Hedge Knight, the first entry in George R.R. Martin’s novella series Tales of Dunk and Egg, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms follows the towering, dim-witted Dunk (played with lovable oafishness by Peter Claffey), the squire to a recently deceased hedge knight. Dunk travels the backroads of Westeros as he looks to compete in a jousting tourney so that he can become a knight.
Along the way, Dunk encounters Egg (Dexter Sol Ansell, small of stature but commanding in screen presence), a precocious bald child who wants nothing more than to become Dunk’s squire. These two oddballs soon cross paths with an assortment of rough-and-tumble characters bearing some of Westeros’ most legendary surnames.
Dunk initially rebuffs Egg, suspecting the mouthy kid is just a thief, but he eventually sees more of his younger self in this strange boy who’s determined to be his squire. The insolent Egg is mysteriously wise in the ways of knighthood and in how things in Westeros operate for reasons that will not become clear until later in the first season. Dunk and Egg are two young people just trying to find their way in this gloomy, life-is-cheap world where the disparity between the haves and have-nots could not be more, ahem, stark.
A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms doesn’t require one to know the past Game of Thrones shows, to have read any of the source material, or to have any extensive knowledge of the franchise’s fantasy lore. While dragons remain a not-too-distant memory in this period and the Targaryens still hold the Iron Throne, this is a Westeros without magic, White Walkers, or any of the genre trappings many viewers may have come to expect and appreciate from the franchise. (There may not be any dragons, but A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms still offers the whoring, violence, dark humor, and occasional full-frontal nudity the franchise is also notable for.)
While that lack of fantasy might seem like a deficit to some, this grounded approach recenters viewers’ attention on the very human characters inhabiting this particular time and place in Westeros.
Rather than going the sword & sorcery route, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms instead blends aspects from underdog sports movies, rites of passage sagas, and archetypal badass and child pairings that the likes of Lone Wolf and Cub, Logan and X-23, the T-800 and John Connor, and the Mandalorian and Grogu have all employed to great effect. (Dunk, though, is far from being the badass any of those characters are.)
Dunk is an Everyman looking to make his mark in a field dominated by the Great Houses; all he has going for him is his size and sheer force of will. He is a Rocky-like palooka who can endure a beating and keep going, as evidenced by the show’s violent jousting tourneys, realized with a grimy brutality not seen since Ridley Scott’s The Last Duel.
Thanks to its compact storytelling – Season 1 is just six episodes, with most running roughly 30 minutes long, the first three directed by Owen Harris and the latter three by Sarah Adina Smith – A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms never feels bloated or like it’s spinning its wheels waiting to get to some big payoff the way that House of the Dragons and Game of Thrones sometimes did. Some flashbacks aside, the first season takes place over just a few days, so it’s pretty close to a real-time adventure in Westeros, where friendships and rivalries are forged quickly but deeply due to life-or-death circumstances.
Smaller both in scale and ambition than its predecessors, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms never quite plumbs the moral depths – and entirely forgoes the dragon-riding fantasy highs – of the previous two Game of Thrones series. Still, it provides the viewer with core protagonists one can remain emotionally invested in, something the overall franchise has occasionally lost sight of in favor of spectacle.
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