'You don't need fancy dragons': Thrones fans picked a half-hour spinoff over House of the Dragon
House of the Dragon has the dragons, the battles and the budget. The Game of Thrones show people are still watching in October is a 35-minute story about a tall man with no money. A Knight of the
House of the Dragon has the dragons, the battles and the budget. The Game of Thrones show people are still watching in October is a 35-minute story about a tall man with no money.
A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms finished its first series in February. It is now October, and the six-episode series is still charting. Collider counts it among HBO Max's biggest titles of 2026, and FlixPatrol still has it in national top 10s, including fifth place on HBO Max in Germany. In February it was number one on the service in 78 countries.
The ratings followed the same slow-burn pattern. The premiere drew 6.7 million US viewers across HBO and HBO Max in its first three days. The finale pulled 9.5 million in the same window, up 42%, and the season averaged more than 14 million US viewers per episode once the stragglers caught up. Shows normally lose people as they go. This one picked them up.
No dragons, no armies, no problem
HBO keeps supplying the comparison. House of the Dragon came back in June for a third series that opened to 21.5 million viewers, 8% down on the second. Its first series was reported at close to $20m an episode and it shows: dragons, sieges, hour-long episodes of Targaryens plotting against Targaryens.
Knight adapts The Hedge Knight, George RR Martin's 1998 novella about Ser Duncan the Tall (Peter Claffey), a hedge knight with a borrowed horse and no surname, and his bald squire Egg (Dexter Sol Ansell). The stakes are one tournament and one man's honour, the episodes run about half an hour, and the biggest set piece is a fight in a field.
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On r/television, where a thread about the show's staying power has turned into a group hug, the most upvoted comment is not about plot at all: "The short episodes make it super consumable. The pacing is pristine." Another commenter put the case against the bigger sibling plainly:
"You don't need fancy dragons and massive battles to win over fans. Best thing in the GoT universe since the early run of the original show. HotD is a mess with terrible pacing issues."
The thread's other theme is tone. One viewer reckons the show works because it "is not unrelentingly dark", with "genuinely good characters trying to do good" in a world built on cynicism. A shorter verdict, lightly censored here: "Who'd have thought, people like to watch stories about common people and not rich c—s."
The most expensive family in Westeros keeps losing the room to a man who can't afford his own armour.
The cast gets its share of the love too, from Daniel Ings's boisterous Lyonel Baratheon to Bertie Carvel's Baelor, the one prince who seems to know what "knight" is supposed to mean.
Close to the book, on purpose
It also helps that the show barely touches its source. Book readers in the thread call it a "damn near perfect adaptation", with a little filler to flesh out the characters and very little else changed. One of the thread's favourite moments is a single line of Dunk's: "Don't all knights take the same oath?" The commenter who quoted it filed it, less politely, as a banger.
That faithfulness is now the plan. The second series, already ordered, adapts The Sworn Sword and will again run to six episodes. Asked by The Hollywood Reporter whether they would get any longer, showrunner Ira Parker kept it short: "Nope, 35."
What comes next
The second series is due in the first half of 2027, with a third novella, The Mystery Knight, waiting after that. Martin has never finished the rest of Dunk and Egg's story, a familiar feeling for anyone still waiting on The Winds of Winter, but there is enough book for two more series.
In the meantime, HBO has a franchise lesson that costs nothing to learn. The fans asked for honest knights and half-hour episodes. Fair enough. The dragons can wait.
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