This is in contrast to Game of Thrones which ran for eight seasons.
House of the Dragon’s co-creator George R.R. Martin has said the series needs “four full seasons” in order to do justice to its source material.
Martin, who also wrote the novels that Game of Thrones and its prequel House of the Dragon are based on, made the comments on his website while writing about the eighth episode of the latter ‘The Lord of the Tides’.
An acclaimed hour of TV – we here at JOE said it might have been the best entry of the series’s first season so far – Martin stated it was everything he “hoped it would be” and praised Paddy Considine for his portrayal of King Viserys.
The writer also addressed House of the Dragon’s much-publicised “time jumps” and said he believed its showrunner Ryan Condal handled them “very well”.
While stating that he wished the series had more time to explore certain relationships between characters and events, he added that there was only so much that could fit into a ten-episode season.
“There are only so many minutes in an episode (more on HBO than on the network shows I once wrote for), and only so many episodes in a season. Fewer and fewer as time goes by, it seems,” he explained.
“When I was a boy, shows had 39 episodes a season. By the time I was writing for Beauty and the Beast, it was down to 22.
“Cable shrunk that even further. The Sopranos had 13 episodes per season, but just a few years later, Game of Thrones had only 10 (and not even that, those last two seasons).”
Martin said that if House of the Dragon had 13 episodes per season, it might have enabled him and Condal to show “all the things” they had to “time jump over”.
However, he stated that this would have risked having some viewers complain that the show was too slow-moving.
“As it is, I am thrilled that we still have 10 hours every season to tell our tale… I hope that will continue to be true,” Martin said.
“It is going to take four full seasons of 10 episodes each to do justice to the Dance of the Dragons, from start to finish,” he added, referring to the Targaryen civil war of succession.
Meanwhile, you can check out our full breakdown of ‘The Lord of the Tides’ right here.
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