When you look at HBO's most successful shows—Game of Thrones, The Wire, True Blood, Boardwalk Empire, True Detective—it's pretty easy to spot a theme. HBO viewers want dark, gritty, violent dramas. Game of Thrones—a fantasy epic with White Walkers, shadow babies, and dragons—doesn't quite fit that formula. But with its feudal political intrigue, uber-violence, and dark tone, it is totally HBO's style. Even the show might end sooner rather than later, author George R.R. Martin is not done with the Game of Thrones universe.
"There are eight million stories in Westeros ... and even more in Essos and the lands beyond. A whole world full of stories, waiting to be told… if indeed HBO is interested," Martin told Entertainment Weekly. "The most natural follow-up would be an adaptation of my Dunk & Egg stories." Set in the same world as A Song of Ice and Fire, Tales of Dunk and Egg follows Dunk (commander of the Kingsguard, Ser Duncan the Tall) and Egg (king Aegon V Targaryen) 90 years before the events in Game of Thrones unfold. As Martin explains:
"Each of the novellas could easily be done as a two-hour stand-alone movie for television; that would probably be the ideal way to do them, rather than as an ongoing weekly series. The Hedge Knight and its sequels are lighter [in tone] than A Song of Ice and Fire, more in the realm of action/adventure."
Lighter in tone? Action/adventure? HBO would have to add more than a few beheadings to get this up to speed. Certainly, this spin-off would have to pretty consistently kill off every main character.
