A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms is taking a vastly different approach with its storytelling compared to House of the Dragon and Game of Thrones. One of those ways is to not just reduce the episode count, but to also reduce the episode length.
While the first episode was around 45 minutes long, that won’t be the case for the rest of the season. A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms will have 30-minute episodes from this point, and it has nothing to do with rushing the story. In fact, the reduction in time is going to be a good thing for the overall story.
The Dunk and Egg novellas are much shorter stories
When you compare the story of The Hedge Knight with the books from the Game of Thrones saga, you’ll see just why 30-minute episodes works well. The stories are much shorter than the massive tomes that George R.R. Martin has written. While Fire & Blood was shorter than the books in the A Song of Ice and Fire saga, the storytelling is done very differently, in that it’s the stories of maesters, and that means there is a lot to flesh out in House of the Dragon
That’s not the case with A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms. The stories are short and focused on Ser Duncan the Tall. Keeping everything contained means that there isn’t much to spread out across 10 hour-long episodes, and Ira Parker, the showrunner of the series, told Nerdist that this was a good thing. In fact, it helped him relax a little with the storytelling, so he could remain faithful to the adaptation.
If he had to add in more story, he would have needed to give something more for Dunk to do. Or it would have meant combining the books, and he probably didn’t really want to do that, either.
George R.R. Martin was happy with this direction as well. In fact, he’d considered doing it as a movie, so a short series makes sense.
A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms is a simplified story in the world of Westeros
The shorter episodes also suit the story itself. A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms is only focused on one character: Dunk. While we get a little bit about Egg, we only learn whatever Dunk learns. That’s the way the TV series is going as well.
Again, it goes back to what’s available in the story. The only way to really stretch out the story is to make it grander. We’d need to see the story of Egg, or even the story of Baelor and other Targaryens. This distracts from the simplified story set in the world of Westeros.
By keeping everything short, everything also remains simple. It remains Dunk!
A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms airs on Sundays at 10/9c on HBO and HBO Max.