How ‘A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms’ Showrunner Ira Parker Knew He Had a Hit

Parker tells IndieWire that HBO knew before he did, greenlighting Season 2 before Season 1 had even aired.

Welcome to It’s a Hit! In this series, IndieWire speaks to creators and showrunners behind a few of our favorite television programs about the moment they realized their show was breaking big.

We are familiar with what HBO‘s smash series “Game of Thrones” offered audiences: vast landscapes shot in exotic locations, from Croatia (ancient Westeros city King’s Landing) to Northern Ireland (snowbound Winterfell), packed with brutal violence, royal misbehavior, incessant backstabbing, and bloody battles complete with giant fire-breathing dragons. In short, the series and its offspring, “House of the Dragon,” boast scale. Massive scale.

Not so “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms,” the most recent George R.R. Martin spinoff from the “A Song of Ice and Fire” franchise. For starters, HBO approved a much smaller budget and just six shorter episodes. And no dragons. And because showrunner Ira Parker was reinventing a Westeros series, he set out to break existing rules and expectations. He knew that abandoning a successful template brings risk. He had no way of knowing if audiences would go for this “Game of Thrones” comedy spinoff with a haircut.

I spoke to Parker from his home office in Belfast, Northern Ireland, after his three children under four had gone to bed. That’s his work time. The “Seven Kingdoms” production has already shot 60 to 70 percent of Season 2, he said on Zoom. He was on hiatus due to massive flooding that wiped out their locations on the island of Gran Canaria off the coast of Africa, which was intended to portray a drought. “Now everything looks green like Belfast,” he said. “So we’ve been waiting it out. It’s getting drier and hotter; we’re waiting for everything to die off.”

Based on Martin’s first “Tales of Dunk and Egg” novella, “The Hedge Knight,” Season 1 was a bit of a classic Western storytelling, said Parker, “very outdoorsy, a lone rider with a couple of horses goes into a new town, finds a girl, they choose pistols at dawn. We certainly have drier, dustier exteriors for Season 2. We are a road show, and every season will be a new location and a new adventure. [Season 2] takes place in a small, little unseen pocket of Westeros, where these two minor houses are having a little feud. These two neighbors are unhappy with each other, and Dunk gets caught in the middle of it.”

Dunk is the lumbering Hedge Knight hero of this series, Ser Duncan the Tall, played by former rugby player Peter Claffey, while Egg is his wise-beyond-his-years bald young squire (Dexter Sol Ansell). The story is told almost completely from Dunk’s point of view.

The ultimate fight scene is a harrowing example of what a gruesome, long-sworded horseback brawl feels like. “Everything on the show comes back to Dunk,” said Parker. “Whenever we had a question, ‘Where do we go here? How do we cut this? What music do we use?’ Even our cinematography, we’re all just trying to get into Dunk’s head. It’s a show about him. And Egg is the most important relationship that he’s ever going to have. But it is his story. We wanted to make sure that within that POV, you felt when he was excited, when he was nervous, when he was hopeful, sad. And when he’s fighting, you had to feel it. You had to feel that he was new with this. You had to feel that he was terrible. You had to feel that when you put a helmet on your head, the first thing you immediately notice is that it cuts off your vision completely. You can’t see anything. All of a sudden, your breath, which is already escalating because your heart’s going at a mile a minute, just keeps coming back at you, and you can’t fucking breathe, and you can’t see anywhere, and you’re weighed down with like 40 pounds of armor now trying to move like you’ve been practicing all this time. It’s not easy. It’s not easy for a first-timer.”

Parker landed the gig one night at 4 o’clock in the morning. He had been within the HBO umbrella for about five years at that point and had worked on Season 1 of “House of the Dragon,” which led to a couple of overall deals at HBO, where he staffed on a number of shows and developed projects. “By the time that show came to me, a few things had happened,” said Parker. “One, they had gotten to know me and my personality and the type of writing that I do. Also [showrunner] Ryan Condal deeply vouched for me and pushed them in my direction.”

Condal had considered running that show himself. Once the offer went to Parker, he read and reread the 90-page novellas. (“It takes about 25 minutes,” he said.) “It was this combination of the guy who wrote on ‘House of the Dragon’ and a guy who wrote on ‘Better Things’ coming to do this smaller, low-key show full of heart. They wanted it to feel quirky. Everybody has a different definition of that word: the joy and struggle of launching that show was how to dial that in. And fortunately, it seems we found the right spot.”

The pilot was well-received, including by Martin. Casting was key to the show’s success, nailing the relationship between the two main characters: the big-lug prole and the smart whippersnapper royal. “It’s obviously a spin on the classic ‘Lone Wolf and Cub,’ because the young mentee is also more intelligent in a lot of ways, but not in all the ways,” said Parker. “There’s much give and take. People can’t figure out if it’s a father-and-son relationship, or if it’s brothers. There’s so much dynamic going on that it switches. And even in Season 2, you’ll see more of that. There’s almost a little bit of an old married couple.”

Dunk asserts his authority with the young squire, but he’s not sure of himself at all. “Dunk is trying to figure this out on the go,” said Parker. “He only has essentially the one role model in his life and a big part of his journey this season, which we saw specifically at the beginning of Episode 3, was him trying to figure out what type of mentor he is going to be. Egg runs off, takes the horse, goes and does some training. Dunk doesn’t know where he went, wakes up, the kid comes back. That’s a prime example of when Dunk probably would have gotten a little hard love from Sir Arlen and Dunk’s immediate reaction is anger, frustration, and then he thinks about it for a second: ‘You know what, I can actually teach this kid how to do this.’ Then he sits down with him and he does it. Every generation inches it forward. It’s not a complete reversal. He’s not trying to be an entirely different human being, but bit by bit, he’s inserting himself into this role as he figures out how to be the mentor.”

Clearly, HBO liked what they were seeing. HBO chief Casey Bloys greenlit Season 2 before Season 1 had aired, based on first cuts of the six episodes. “We hadn’t made any giant missteps, and the budget was looking appropriate,” said Parker. “I’m glad they knew. I didn’t know. I never know, and I honestly was confused about this one for a long, long time.”

Parker was exploring uncharted action comedy terrain. “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms” isn’t like other shows. “I always thought that my comedy writing sensibility was like, ’30 Rock’ meets ‘The West Wing,'” he said, “but then I rewatched ‘Seinfeld’ for the first time in a long time. I stole a lot of stuff. There’s a lot of sarcasm, and a lot of personalities. You run it through your processor, and this other thing comes out. Obviously, we’re in the ‘Game of Thrones’ world. There’s a lot that we drew on visually. [Michael] Fassbender’s ‘Macbeth’ was a big one for us. I love the big historical epics that they don’t make anymore. I wanted, for our budget, for us to get as much scale as we possibly could by having the camera hang back in long, wide shots, and letting the action play out.”

When the time came for the premiere, the first showing was in Berlin. “I wasn’t sure all the comedy was landing,” said Parker. “We went to Italy, and all the comedy was. The one that made me feel the best was London, maybe because it was a fan screening, and I was sitting amongst the crowd. That was the best reaction that I’d heard so far.”

Parker still wasn’t sure after the first two episodes. “I still felt nervous,” he said. “I didn’t know which way it was going to swing. The tides were either going to go with us or against us, and then it was Episode 3, after the turn, the reveal of Egg. My partner’s 83-year-old father said that he had been discussing it with his poker group, a bunch of other retirees. The attorney said, ‘I didn’t see it coming. I had no idea.’ This was not our target group, and they seem to be enjoying this. So maybe we have something here.”

Parker had shut down his social media in order to focus on shooting Season 2. “There was a lot of writing still going on, and we were in production, and so my head was buried,” he said. Parker was finally convinced he had a hit after the first three episodes posted 6.7 million viewers, marking the third-largest series launch in HBO Max history. Word of mouth and office water-cooler chatter built so that the series eventually averaged some 14 million U.S. viewers and 26 million global viewers per episode, and the finale drew 9.5 million U.S. viewers.

And Season 2 brings more players like Scottish actor Peter Mullan as the Lord of House Osgrey, and Lucy Boynton as the Lady Rohanne Webber, the Red Widow of House Webber and the neighboring house, Coldmoat. “They get into a dispute over water,” said Parker. “She dams the river that feeds his farmers and their crops in the middle of a drought. Because everybody is experiencing a drought, and she has a lot of people to take care of as well. And Dunk is caught up in the middle of this and trying to do something that he’s never had to do before. Maybe he made his bones in the fighting arena this year, but he’s going to have to do a little bit of politicking.”

Clearly, audiences were ready for a kinder, gentler hero. The series seems to be filling a need. “Our goal was to make something that felt timeless,” he said. “But it has to have legs. If you go back 30 years, you find people being shitty to each other and in need of a hero with good grounding and honorableness to lift people out of that. And if you go back 30 years before that, and 30 years before that. So look, I hope in another 30 years, people aren’t re-watching this, thinking, ‘Man, this is so timely,’ but I’m afraid that’s generally the case.”