A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms might be smaller in scale than Game of Thrones, but it’s clearly hitting the mark. The HBO series has injected new energy into the franchise, earning strong reviews and impressive audience scores right out of the gate.
Still, there’s one thing fans keep circling back to. The episodes are short. Like, really short. Now showrunner Ira Parker is setting the record straight on why that choice was essential.
Set decades before the events of Game of Thrones, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms follows Ser Duncan the Tall and his sharp-witted squire Egg as they wander Westeros.
Season 1 runs only six episodes, each landing around 30 to 35 minutes. Some viewers want more time in this world, but others have praised how clean and focused the storytelling feels.
Honestly, the tighter runtime works. The episodes are lean, there’s no filler clogging things up, and the story never feels stretched just to hit a time requirement.
The conversation around episode length really heated up after Episode 4 arrived early thanks to the Super Bowl. The episode explored the consequences of Dunk standing up to Aerion Targaryen and finally confirmed Egg’s true identity.
Fans and critics ate it up, pushing the episode to a wild 9.7 out of 10 on IMDb. That score now places it among the highest-rated episodes across the entire Game of Thrones TV universe.
Despite that praise, the short runtimes keep coming up. Speaking with GQ, Parker explained that the creative team always planned it this way. Season 1 adapts The Hedge Knight, the first of George R.R. Martin’s Dunk and Egg novellas. It’s a relatively short story, and padding it out just to reach hour-long episodes was never the goal.
As Parker explained, HBO was on board with a leaner format before Martin was even brought into the conversation.
“Even before going to George, we knew that’s what it could be. HBO had offered that up already. It made it easier to—[laughs] I don’t want to say convince, but sort of convince George that this could be done as a television series [and done] well. One of his big concerns with this being a faithful adaptation is that it just does not stretch out to that level.”
A big challenge came from the source material itself. Parker pointed out that much of The Hedge Knight lives inside Dunk’s head, joking that he’s one of the most “angstiest” characters in all of Westeros.
Translating that internal monologue to the screen meant expanding the world around him rather than forcing extra plot. At one point, Parker even questioned whether the story could work as a TV series at all.
What helped was HBO’s approach. Parker admitted he expected pressure to match the usual franchise expectations with long seasons and oversized episodes.
Instead, the studio gave the team space to tell the story the way it needed to be told. The shorter episodes allowed the series to stay sharp and character-driven without “overstaying its welcome.”
Without pressure to hit hour-long episodes or inflate the story, the team could focus on character, tone, and relationships. Parker said that freedom opened the door to expanding the world in ways that felt natural rather than forced.
“Him knowing that HBO wasn’t going to force that—then we could just have fun. Then we can hang out in Westeros. We can get to know Dunk and Egg better and their relationship better. Season one, we can introduce a little bit of our Trial-ers [of the Seven] before it comes to the main showdown.
“Lyonel Baratheon has a much bigger part in the show than in the book, where I think he has one line right before the trial. A lot of that was very natural. It was very easy. We weren’t stretching. We weren’t doing any strange side quests with Dunk and Egg. We wrote it as if George had written a three-hundred-page book.”
From the earliest conversations, Martin was clear about staying true to the heart of The Hedge Knight. Parker said those discussions centered on respect for the original story rather than inflating it for television. With the novella coming in at roughly 84 pages, restraint wasn’t just smart, it was necessary.
In the end, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms isn’t trying to be the biggest show in Westeros. It’s focused on telling one story well, and so far, that approach is paying off. Sometimes less really is more, especially when the story doesn’t need anything extra to land its punch.
