A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms isn’t like other shows. At the very least, it’s not so similar that you have to take it seriously. Less than five minutes into the premiere, the HBO series clearly adjusts the expectations of anyone who might be confused. With a sword in hand, our strapping hero, Ser Duncan the Tall (Irish actor Peter Claffey, recently seen in ), decides to enter a tournament. As he tilts his face toward the heavens, we hear Thrones‘ solemn, throbbing theme song, the same one that now plays at the start of episodes. Suddenly, the music cuts off. The camera zooms in on the knight’s face as he audibly defecates. To make sure we still get the message that earthy humor is in store, the shot widens to show his bare butt and what’s coming out of it.
So, yes, Seven Kingdoms, premiering on Jan. 18, delves into a more lighthearted side of Westeros. Adapted from George R.R. Martin’s Tales of Dunk and Egg novellas—though they initially sound like they’d document a national coffee chain’s breakfast menu, they actually follow Duncan, aka Dunk, and his tiny squire, Egg—the first season has just six episodes, each around 35 minutes long. (It’s already been renewed for a second season, as part of to give us new Thrones content every year until 2028.) Instead of juggling multiple storylines, a vast map, and dozens of characters—most of them nobles vying for control of a continent—it focuses on two humble leads in a meadow. The lower stakes do make for a lighter watch, except toward the end of the season, which is heavy with gloom and gore. But the show’s weak plot and hit-or-miss attempts at humor also raise questions about the franchise’s health. Is this really the most compelling, or even the most entertaining, story left to mine from Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire canon?
Created by author and showrunner Ira Parker, a veteran of House of the Dragon, Seven Kingdoms is set a century before the events of the original Game of Thrones series. Though the Targaryens still rule Westeros, the fair-haired dynasty is enduring a dragon drought that won’t end until Daenerys comes along, generations in the future. This is all way above Dunk’s pay grade—Dunk is a simple, burly youth who grew up squiring for Ser Arlan of Pennytree (Danny Webb). Arlan, a chronically intoxicated but kind-hearted master, has just died. But first, he knighted Dunk. Like his adoptive father, Dunk is a hedge knight—that is, a traveling, often penniless and disrespected hired swordsman, not a well-paid, elaborately armored, widely revered defender of a noble lord. As one cynical character puts it: “There are as many hedge knights as there are hedges.”
Traveling to Ashford Meadow for the tournament with the three horses he inherited, Dunk meets a stable boy who introduces himself as Egg (a precocious Dexter Sol Ansell), a fitting name since he’s bald. Egg is the opposite of Dunk: tiny, smart, bold. He wants to be Dunk’s squire, but Dunk has doubts mostly stemming from his own insecurities; flashbacks suggest he still feels like the scared teenager in need of Arlan’s guidance. He and Egg work out their odd-couple alliance as Dunk tries to prove his mettle in the games and find a way forward without Arlan. It’s all pretty quaint until the Targaryens, known for their equal measure of valor and madness, ride in to ramp up the drama.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with centering common folk in a universe viewers have mostly seen through the eyes of its ruling class in previous iterations. The angle definitely worked for the revolutionary Disney+ series , which might be the best thing the has produced in five decades of pop-culture prominence. And Seven Kingdoms does meet the high technical standards of the Thrones brand—immersive, bloody combat, dim lighting, and all. Claffey exudes just enough charisma to make us root for Dunk without downplaying the character’s unrefined clumsiness; he and Ansell are quite charming together.
But unlike Andor, which used its relatively obscure protagonist to showcase regular citizens’ resistance to the tyranny integral to the Star Wars mythology, Seven Kingdoms seems mostly to bridge the gap between Dragon seasons. It tries hard to be funny, especially in the early episodes. Sadly, its idea of humor includes, for example, a recurring gag about Dunk’s eternal gratitude to Arlan for only beating him when he deserved it. Elsewhere, various bodily excretions serve as punchlines. Crudeness isn’t new to the pseudo-medieval Thrones landscape, but it worked better as a counterbalance to the high-flown rhetoric of would-be sovereigns. (You could even argue Martin’s mix of high and low echoed that of and .) Here, that tone balance is somewhat restored in the second half of the season, after a revelation that establishes Dunk and Egg’s relevance to —and in doing so kind of undercuts the show’s initial aim to ground the Thrones saga in reality.
The show also falls victim to a few unfortunate streaming-era trends, from a that delays a cliffhanger’s payoff by filling in backstory of questionable use, to a lack of plot that makes the short season feel like an overgrown prologue. A franchise that once set the standard for prestige TV is now, seemingly to keep Thrones fans subscribed to HBO Max indefinitely, perpetuating some of the genre’s must outdated clichés. Instead of the best Martin has to offer, it seems we’re now getting whatever is easiest to adapt. Seven Kingdoms might be too mild to hate, but in its first season, it’s also too meager to love.