House of the Dragon S2 Premiere Update Is a Relief Amid Shortened Season News
While we’re still only getting eight episodes next season, not all hope is lost.
Adaptations are their own art. Figuring out exactly how to transfer characters, events, and settings from pages to screens is by no means an easy undertaking, especially with avid fans breathing down your neck; there’s no room for mistakes.
Generally, the rule of thumb is to avoid removing or changing the source material too much, but that doesn’t solve another problem — pacing and timeline. Take House of the Dragon, for example: this show splits one book into several seasons, and while adapting it, they also need to conform to the laws of television… Hard job, that.
HotD Season 2 Will Be Shortened
It’s due to the pacing and timeline reasons that House of the Dragon won’t have equal-length seasons. Original shows tend to follow an established guideline — 10, 15, 22, or any other set number episodes per season — but this strategy doesn’t always work with adaptations. It definitely won’t in the case of House of the Dragon.
In March 2024, Deadline reported that HotD Season 2 will only have eight episodes against the premiere season’s 10 episodes. The show’s long-term planning allowed the production team to distribute the events of Fire & Blood equally in a way that makes sense both in terms of adapting the book and general TV rules.
But if you were upset by the shortened Season 2, the latest update should come as a relief for you. While shorter, the upcoming season will have longer episodes.
HotD Season 2 Has Longer Episodes
Perfectly balanced as all things should be, House of the Dragon will seemingly compensate for its shortened Season 2 with longer episodes. As we recently learned, the premiere episode of HotD S2 will span across just over 64 minutes, making it the longest House of the Dragon episode so far, but not for long.
Consequent episodes’ duration has not been revealed yet, but it only seems logical to expect them to be longer than in Season 1, especially considering how many important events are planned for Season 2. We can at the very least expect the S2 finale to be a longer episode, too: the showrunners deliberately cut the script into pieces in a way that will leave the juiciest events for the peak points of the show.
Source: Deadline