Ryan Condal explains the reduced episode count in House of the Dragon Season 2

The showrunner of House of the Dragon explained why the second season will have fewer episodes than the first. In an interview with TechRadar, Ryan Condal said there were many reasons behind this decision. The main reason for reducing the number of episodes from ten to eight was based on the story they wanted to tell.

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House of the Dragon Season 2 will be shorter but just as intense, says showrunner

The first six seasons of Game of Thrones had ten episodes each. The episode count was reduced in the final two seasons as the story had to be created without any source material.

Despite the shorter season, Condal assures fans that House of the Dragon season 2 will be as intense as the first. The series has a complete book, Fire & Blood, by George R.R. Martin, from which to draw.

However, this book is more of an outline of events rather than a detailed narrative. It describes the civil war within House Targaryen, known as The Dance of the Dragons, which led to their downfall.

Condal, Martin, and the other writers had to expand on the book’s brief descriptions and decide which events to include this season and how to end it. This, combined with the limited resources available for production, led to the decision to have a shorter season. Condal stated:

“There was a host of factors that went into that decision. It’s a big, ambitious show, and it can become unwieldy in terms of the number of shoot days [you have], and certainly the the amount of resources that you have to make it. We have a phenomenal amount of resources, but those those are still finite.

“In the final analysis of it all, once season one landed and we knew where we were in the narrative, we had a clear path of view to the end and knew what the end of this particular chapter in the Targaryen history was. Looking at that, and knowing essentially how much storytelling time we needed to get there, there was a bit of a rebalancing of the narrative that was necessary to happen. This eight-episode cadence helped us to find that.”