‘A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms’ (Review)

Make no mistake, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms is a comedy through and through, something that Westeros embeds might turn off within the first five minutes. It’s got quick-cut editing, comedically-paced flashbacks, and a literal fart joke (with follow through). But, stick with it, because Seven Kingdoms is exactly the type of show that TV needs: a cross-generational story, starting from beneath the underdog, that immediately commands your belief in these characters. 

Peter Claffey stars as Duncan (Dunk), a squire whose aspirations of honor are as tall as he is. After the death of his knight, Ser Arlan of Pennytree, he undergoes a quest for knighthood that takes him to a tourney in the Riverlands where he meets a young boy called Egg (Dexter Sol Ansell) who wants to be his squire. By itself, the setup feels fairly standard – maybe even a little bit cliched. But, Seven Kingdoms’ strength lies in a few key elements executed excellently by showrunner Ira Parker: performances, writing, and emotional depth. 

Claffey is immediately endearing as a superficially simple yet deeply honest man who has to grapple with the dogma of knighthood as he comes into his own. Not much is shown of his squire-hood, but positioning this show as a comedy allows for some solid juxtaposition of how Dunk recalls his past with how it actually happened, which underscores a central mission for his character: to be a knight as good as how he believes knights to be.

He instils those ideals into Egg, a precocious young boy who insists on being Dunk’s squire. What both Claffey and Ansell excel at is portraying an archetype in Westeros that was thrown away in previous series; there are no attempts at nobility, these characters’ journeys touch on the political intrigue that beleaguered George R R Martin’s sprawling mythos. The show succeeds at making the audience believe that, even though these characters may not go down in history, their stories are still worth following. 

From 2025’s Welcome to Derry, to Seven Kingdoms, it’s clear that HBO’s strong suit is finding kids who can act. With genre programming, where immersion is the name of the game, one jarring performance can take a viewer right out of it, but Ansell provides the bulk of the show’s emotional depth by being a talented actor who understands his character on a fundamental level. I won’t spoil it for people who know nothing about Egg, but his precociousness may be more than just a way of enamoring him to an audience. And, Egg’s more innocent moments aren’t rebuffed by Dunk, they’re extrapolated upon because Dunk himself carries a level of naivety that imbues the character with dimensionality. 

Seven Kingdoms is set 100 years before the events of Game of Thrones, when the Targaryens still ruled Westeros. Unlike House of the Dragon, which begs its audience to sympathize with one of two sides of patently evil, this series reminds viewers of the sympathetic branches of that family tree. It doesn’t shy away from the insidious nature of some Targs, and in fact the latter half of the season is built around that pettiness taken to the extreme, but more than any other entry into the visual canon of Thrones, Seven Kingdoms lets viewers into the charisma that created a dynasty. 

There’s a boots on the ground approach to how Seven Kingdoms handles the Targaryens. While audiences for the two other Thrones shows get glimpses at how the other noble houses of Westeros view the family, Seven Kingdoms has candid observations of them being “incestuous aliens” who invaded their country, which provides a more textured rebuff to some of the propaganda-esque messaging that House of the Dragon seems to have built up over the past four years.

I won’t go as far as to say that this show enhances the others, but through its visual composition it manages to blend the record-keeping bias with some level of objectivity that does remind audiences of the fact that both House of the Dragon and Game of Thrones are stories written by the victors.

While it may be hard to imagine a true comedy set in Westeros (and period/fantasy comedies don’t have the best reputation, see: Hulu’s The Princess), Seven Kingdoms works because it dials up the comedic elements from Thrones and Dragon in place of political machinations. Like Dunk, Seven Kingdoms simply isn’t interested in that. I would say it knows its place, but that’s a little too reductive to just how well it fits within the world.

The production and set design are still top tier, the costuming feels ancestrally familiar, and the world from Dunk’s perspective is dusty and lived in. Seven Kingdoms retains an unvarnished look at violence, combat and battles, with all elements of the production coming together to ensure the right moments are adequately visceral. Translation: a lot of squelching. 

Balance is one objective with a show like this. It would be a lot to tell a plot driven story with characters we have no connection to in a thirty minute comedy. Seven Kingdoms strikes a balance by forgoing a world-shaking climax, instead driving the story forward with its characters’ own desires. It’s not an approach that everyone will like; there’s no back-biting, double allegiances, or scheming. Instead, there’s a wholesome show about the mentorship between a man and a boy. It’s the type of show that could only exist right now, where Westeros has such a high level of cultural permeability that it can be as concise as it wants to be. 

A KNIGHT OF THE SEVEN KINGDOMS RELEASES ITS FIRST EPISODE ON SUNDAY, JANUARY 18 ON HBO. NEW EPISODES RELEASE WEEKLY.