The Sopranos helped to change so much about television.
An overlooked element is that it’s a drama that’s often flat out hilarious. One of my favorite tidbits related to the show is that creator David Chase openly talks about how he sees the show as essentially being a comedy.
That said, I view The Sopranos as a drama with a lot of comedy baked into the mix, and then it also sprinkles in the perfect mix of existential weirdness.
By the 2010s, half hour shows that were ostensibly comedies started popping up that actively subverted our expectations. Pre-disgrace era Louis C.K. was an innovator here with Louie, which was often melancholy, strange, or even scary as much as it was occasionally funny.
Starting in 2016, Donald Glover’s Atlanta helped set a new and brilliant standard with a half hour-ish show that could and would tell wildly different kinds of stories, sometimes not involving the main cast or established world of the show at all.
In the streaming era, there’s no standard TV episode length anymore, further allowing comedy and drama to blend into one another. That being said, it’s often clear what a show is trying to signal itself as – either for marketing or awards purposes – in terms of the broad umbrellas of comedy or drama. And that still includes the rough gauge of episodic running time that hews closer to 30 minutes for comedies and 45 minutes to an hour for dramas.
Which brings us to A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms.
The third fantasy TV series set in the world of Westeros and beyond conjured by novelist George R.R. Martin, my every expectation for what this show could be and achieve has been easily surpassed after watching its first four episodes.
As I mention in this piece that praises the joy of small, talky prestige TV, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms – in keeping with Martin’s Tales of Dunk and Egg prequel novellas – keeps the stakes relatively low while smartly focusing on a small number of characters that we get to spend real time getting to know.
The brilliant bit though, particularly after the mostly grim and grandiose doings of two seasons of House of the Dragon, is that it warms up the tone considerably while also punctuating well-earned comedic moments into the mix.
Indeed, there’s a scene involving a drunken, singing Ser Lyonel Baratheon (Daniel Ings, who steals every scene he’s in thus far) in the third episode, “The Squire,” that’s easily the funniest I’ve seen on television in recent months.
And even as the stakes are relatively low, we quickly become invested in Ser Duncan the Tall (Peter Claffey) and his young squire Egg (Dexter Sol Ansell), and want to see good things happen for them both. The key here too is that unlike both Game of Thrones and HotD before it, A Knight puts two purely good characters at the center of its frame, avoiding both the moral murk and dizzyingly large casts from those other shows.
What’s remarkable too is that the pacing manages to be brisk and confident – so much so that as each 30-ish minute episode ends, we are left hungry for more, as though we’re at a fabulous multi-course banquet ravenous for the next small, delectable plate to arrive.
Which brings us back to the fuzzy notion of the half-hour drama. I’m confident stating that just four episodes in, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms is already one of the best of that specialized breed I’ve ever seen.