‘Seven Kingdoms’ Showrunner Receives 12 Unpublished Dunk and Egg Stories From George R.R. Martin
Fantasy IPs are booming in Hollywood at the moment. The various onscreen pinnacles of Middle-earth, the Wizarding World, and Westeros may be long behind us now, but all of these franchises have fresh adaptations either in the works or, in one case, currently upon us. The adaptation in the latter category is “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms,” the latest HBO series based on George R.R. Martin’s “A Song of Ice and Fire.” The pilot of “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms” aired on Jan. 18. The day before it premiered, showrunner Ira Parker explained Martin’s generous creative input for this unique new onscreen interpretation of Westeros.
Martin Provides a Wealth of Source Material – Unpublished
On Jan. 17, Parker spoke in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter. The primary topic for discussion was the creative workings behind “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms,” which follows the adventures of a lowborn knight named Ser Duncan “Dunk” the Tall (Peter Claffey) and his child squire, Prince Aegon “Egg” Targaryen (Dexter Soll Ansell). The series is based on the “Tales of Dunk and Egg,” a trilogy of novellas that Martin published between 1998 and 2010. Specifically, its first season is an adaptation of 1998’s “The Hedge Knight.”
One of Parker’s revelations in this interview is that these three published stories are far from the extent of the source material he has to work with. Asked whether he was worried that the series may “get ahead of the books” as “Game of Thrones” ultimately did, he explained that Martin had “outlined 12 more of these stories that he’s shared with me. These stories take them [Dunk and Egg] all the way through their lives. Some of these are just a paragraph, but they give you a sense of where they’re going to go and the people who come back in and out of the story.”
This kind of source material may not be as rich or complete a wellspring as any published novella, but it will suffice as a wholly canon basis for continuing “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms” almost into perpetuity. At least, this is how it seems when you put it in the perspective of how economically the show has adapted Martin’s written work thus far: each season is adapting one novella, which means that “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms” is already set up for two more seasons after Season 1’s Episode 6 finale airs on Feb. 22. With the number of unpublished stories Martin has shared with Parker, the show could conceivably continue far longer than “Game of Thrones” did.
Parker also professed to feeling very pleased with the runtime of his show. Season 1 of “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms” consists of six episodes in all, and each of these is between 30 and 40 minutes in length; this, he said, is appropriate for an adaptation of a novella, ensuring that “we didn’t have to stretch the story” while also making it so “it feels like it’s filling out these novellas in a way that hopefully George would have done if he had just written them as novels instead of 80-page nuggets.”
The “Seven Kingdoms”‘s Immediate Future
In this interview, Parker also gave a rough outline of what production of the show’s second season (based on the 2003 novella “The Shorn Sword”) should look like. It will also consist of six episodes, he said, and “I think the scope will be the same, maybe even smaller.” The budget on Season 2 is a different matter: it “has stayed the same, but everything is more expensive due to inflation. Plus, book two takes place in a drought, so… We have to go to a sunny location with no water, which costs money – that’s a major expense that we did not have in season one.”
Overall, however, Parker seemed very optimistic regarding Season 2, which he was “having a lot of fun” with, and which “is going to be a different season, and, I hope, for the better.”
