House of the Dragon’s pilot is playing the long game

polygon.com:

After eight seasons and more than a decade as a pop-culture sensation, it’s easy to forget that Game of Thrones wasn’t a surefire hit when it first arrived on HBO in 2011. With the original Lord of the Rings film trilogy firmly in the cultural rearview, and no fantasy stories rising to take its place (including the often forgotten Hobbit trilogy), it didn’t seem likely to catch on at all. But that’s not the case with HBO’s new successor show House of the Dragon. Fantasy TV is big business, Lord of the Rings is back, and plenty of people are already desperate to love Game of Thrones again after the disappointment of its last couple seasons. And House of the Dragon’s pilot makes great use of its audience’s good faith.

The franchise hopes to move forward by looking backward; House of the Dragon is a prequel set around 200 years before the events of Game of Thrones. The series will tell the story of an event known as the Dance of the Dragons, essentially a Targaryen civil war over the succession of the Iron Throne, which turned all of Westeros against itself.

These events make up the last half of the book Fire & Blood by A Song of Ice and Fire author George R.R. Martin. But with half a book coming before we get to all that, House of the Dragon has a whole lot of table setting to do before things really get going. And it appears to be taking its time and getting there carefully — in fact, the pilot is basically a prequel to the prequel, set over a decade before the major fighting in the Dance of the Dragons will occur and featuring its two most important characters as teenagers rather than adults.

Game of Thrones opens with an ice zombie, then slowly, step by step, introduces you to all of its main characters — some who are