Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Tori Preston | TV | January 20, 2026
Look, I hate to do this, but I’m here to inform you that there’s a new Game of Thrones show in town, and it’s good. Or at least, it has serious potential. Now, I know. We all said Game of Thrones was good, up until it wasn’t. And even though House of the Dragon was never very good to begin with, it’s always had Matt Smith in a silly wig, and that’s not nothing. But A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms is different! It’s fun and funny, and it’s got something its predecessors lacked: accessibility. It’s easy to jump aboard, regardless of your familiarity with the franchise as a whole. A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms is basically The Hobbit to GoT’s The Lord of the Rings.
I don’t mean it’s a children’s story (any confusion on that front was dispelled the moment the main character, Dunk, started defecating during the GoT theme in the first episode), but it’s something equally discrete in scope. There isn’t a large cast of characters to juggle. The fate of the kingdom isn’t at stake, nor is there a single dragon in sight. Instead, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms seems, on the face of it, to be a straightforward underdog story. Dunk (Peter Claffey), an orphan who squired for a poor, deceased hedge knight, attempts to enter a tourney to make a name for himself as a knight in his own right, which he technically isn’t. That name? “Ser Duncan the Tall”. Along the way, he picks up a mysterious squire of his own, a boy named Egg (Dexter Sol Ansell), and he rubs elbows with a lot of nobles with familiar names like “Baratheon” and “Dondarrion.” The show offers a look at Westeros during a time of peace, from the vantage point of the common folk, and while Dunk’s life is sure to get more challenging as the series progresses, it’s not like he’s a secret Targaryen or anything. I mean, that’d be ridiculous!
[Don’t worry, I’m not going to spoil anything from “The Tales of Dunk and Egg,” the novellas by George R. R. Martin on which this series is based. If you want to know what twists might be in store for these characters, there are plenty of wikis for that.]
Like The Hobbit, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms is set a couple of generations before the events of Game of Thrones. If House of the Dragon takes place almost 200 years before GoT, then Dunk and Egg’s adventures are smack dab in the middle — about 90 years after HotD and 90 years before GoT. However, you don’t really need to remember a whole lot about either show, or the books they’re based on, to keep up. The names may be familiar, but the characters are all new. Want to know who Ser Lyonel “The Laughing Storm” Baratheon is? In Game of Thrones terms, he’s either the great-grandfather of Robert and Stannis Baratheon, or maybe their great-uncle. As far as A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms is concerned, though, Ser Lyonel, played with delightful swagger by Daniel Ings, is just one hell of a good time! He certainly has no idea his family will one day overthrow the Targaryens and sit on the Iron Throne. And while that knowledge may make you enjoy his turn on the dancefloor in the first episode a little more, it’s hardly necessary to appreciate Ser Lyonel’s relationship with Dunk.
In fact, if there’s any knowledge from the other shows that does matter, it might be a throwaway bit of dialogue between King Joffrey and Jaime Lannister from the season four premiere of GoT. Joffrey flips through the Book of Brothers, a tome with entries detailing the exploits of every member who ever served in the Kingsguard, maintained by the Lord Commander. After passing by famous figures like Ser Arthur Dayne, Joffrey stumbles upon a member he’s never heard of.
Joffrey: “Ser Duncan the Tall? Hah, four pages for Ser Duncan… he must have been quite a man!”Jaime: “So they say.”
If you’re wondering why the story of a dragon-less hedge knight and tiny, bald squire are important enough for HBO to spin them off into the third leg of their biggest fantasy franchise … well, that’s a pretty big clue right there. Someday, Ser Duncan the Tall will be a member of the Kingsguard, with four pages of exploits worth recording. We don’t know how or when it’ll happen, but after watching two shows full of lofty people doing pretty terrible things, I’m excited to see how a poor guy taking a dump behind a tree winds up in the Red Keep guarding a King.
