House of the Dragon won’t mess up Dunk and Egg or any other Game of Thrones spinoff

polygon.com:

Game of Thrones had a profound effect on the television industry — especially for the folks working at HBO. In the years since the show’s 2019 finale, the cable channel became a linchpin in Warner Bros. Discovery’s plans for the Max streaming service with instruction to expand not only the Thrones IP but anything in the Warner vault, from DC to Dune. The Thrones well seems particularly deep thanks to writer George R.R. Martin’s direct involvement; on top of House of the Dragon, which returns for season 2 this Sunday, June 16, a number of spinoff series, live action and animated, remain in active development. Clearly, there’s a lot of Westerosian history to cover.

House of the Dragon showrunner Ryan Condal is well aware, but not sweating the continuity too much. During a recent press day for season 2, the writer said that from the beginning, the team “had pretty good narrative freedom to tell the story that [they] wanted to tell.” It doesn’t hurt that Martin was around early in development, after a period of time when HBO incubated a number of ideas for an offshoot of the franchise and even shot a pilot with actor Naomi Watts that didn’t move forward. Condal is thankful that unlike most prequels, Martin’s source material, Fire & Blood, gives him plenty of remove from the flagship series. “The nice thing about the Targaryen dynasty is they rule for almost 300 years, so there’s a lot of leeway there. Not everything is packed into a dense period of time,” he said.

But Condal is still connected to the greater Game of Thrones development pipeline. He said he is in regular communication with writer Ira Parker, who wrote the Dunk and Egg series The Hedge Knight, which has a cast, has conducted table reads, and is set to begin filming later in 2024. Chronologically, Martin’s Dunk and Egg stories take place around 70 years after House of the Dragon and 90 years before Game of Thrones. But Condal is adamant about not creating a canon that requires “a bunch of folding and