When the weekend started, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms was reviewing well, but was under both the Rotten Tomatoes scores of the original Game of Thrones and its prequel, House of the Dragon. No great surprise, perhaps, but now with more reviews, it has comfortably surpassed both.
A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms went from an 88% to a now certified fresh 94% on Rotten Tomatoes. That is higher than Game of Thrones at an 89%, obviously dragged down by its final season, and House of the Dragon’s 87%, combining its two seasons. It does, however, have the lowest audience score of the three at a 72%, though that’s just a few hundred reviews, rather than tens of thousands. Seven Kingdoms is also the highest-scored first season of either show.
Here is how A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms stacks up against all the individual seasons’ scores, where Thrones does have a number above it if you break them out like that.
- Game of Thrones season 2 – 97%
- Game of Thrones season 4 – 97%
- Game of Thrones season 3 – 96%
- A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms – 94%
- Game of Thrones season 6 – 94%
- Game of Thrones season 5 – 93%
- Game of Thrones season 7 – 93%
- Game of Thrones season 1 – 90%
- House of the Dragon season 1 – 90%
- House of the Dragon season 2 – 84%
- Game of Thrones season 8 – 55%
Not bad at all. The series, non-book-readers discovered, is a comedy more than anything else, echoing the tone of the Dunk and Egg novellas, though it even went so far it surprised George RR Martin, who commented on the now-infamous intro of Dunk taking a dump on the Game of Thrones fanfare:
“Yeah, that was a bit of a surprise. Not to say that my characters don’t take shits, but I normally don’t write about them at any length. When I saw the rough cut, I wrote, ‘What is this? Where did this come from? I don’t know if we really need the shit.’ But [showrunner Ira Parker] liked it for whatever reason.”
While this may sound like another “George RR Martin spars with showrunners” situation, he has been emphatic about how much he likes the series and working with the team, calling it “as faithful as adaptation as a reasonable man could hope for (and you all know how incredibly reasonable I am on that particular subject).” Martin has previously butted heads with other shows, especially House of the Dragon, over book accuracy. But he likes Seven Kingdoms so much that he’s actually given 12 more unpublished novellas for potential use. It seems like this show may run a while, and so far, so good.
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