Culture > Western Culture

A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms: A Small Story Scores a Huge Victory, but Does Tragedy Loom?

An HBO series mostly avoids woke and thereby succeeds.

William Sullivan | March 14, 2026

If, like me, you’ve largely given up on movies and television shows in recent years as we find ourselves awash in a sea of bad reboots and producers trying to out-woke each other rather than simply tell an entertaining story, I’d urge you to reconsider when it comes to the first season of this particular HBO series, which just wrapped a few weeks ago.  

This story, a prequel to the wildly successful Game of Thrones series, is arguably the best television fantasy-adventure series in a very long time. 

A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms is set in George R.R. Martin’s fictional land of Westeros, about which he weaves a rich tapestry over many centuries of its recorded history in his many books. HBO’s Game of Thrones series, based upon Martin’s as-yet-unfinished series of books known as A Song of Ice and Fire, is the most current story in this world’s timeline.  

It is a massive story, densely packed with countless familial factions (known as Houses), myriad characters, interwoven story arcs, captivating palace intrigue and seemingly endless lore.  Yet, you don’t need to know any of that to immediately understand the characters and the world of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms.

The story is set nearly 100 years before the events of the Game of Thrones series, and the lead character, a knight named Ser Duncan the Tall (“ser” is the correct spelling in G.R.R. Martin’s world), is played by Irish rugby-player-turned-actor Peter Claffey.  He plays Dunk.

Graphic: Corps of Armored Knights greet visitors to the Metropolitan Museum of Art's armor exhibit (6) (855191870). Wikimedia.commons. CCA........

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