We already know that HBO’s latest Game of Thrones prequel, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, will break from its predecessors in several important ways. The series, which is based on author George R. R. Martin’s trio of “Dunk and Egg” novellas, is set roughly 90 years before the events of Game of Thrones in a Westeros that lacks the dragons, dire wolves, and magic that are so prevalent in the original series and its other spinoff, House of the Dragon. The story will have a lighter tone and focus on the lives of more average, everyday people rather than those with fancy surnames like Stark or Lannister. It won’t feature an elaborate title sequence or a soundtrack created by Ramin Djawadi. Heck, if the trailer is anything to go by, this show is even going to be well-lit. Miracles are happening all around us!cnx.cmd.push(function() {cnx({playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530",}).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796");});But the most significant way in which the show is differentiating itself from its predecessors is in its length. A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms season 1 will be comprised of six episodes that will each be only about half an hour long.The news comes from Collider’s Perri Nemiroff, who sat down with Seven Kingdoms creator Ira Parker following the series’ New York Comic Con panel. Parker shared some interesting insights about his initial expectations when taking on the series and how they stacked up to reality. “Being, obviously, a huge Game of Thrones fan and a writer on House of the Dragon, I assumed that this was going to be 10 hour-long episodes every season,” he said. “Obviously, these novellas are shorter. They are not the massive tomes that we get to enjoy for the other series, so I thought we were going to combine them, bring it all together, bring in elements of the Blackfyre Rebellion pretty immediately.”The Blackfyre Rebellion is an important event in Westerosi history involving multiple Targaryen claimants to the Iron Throne following Aegon the Unworthy’s (truly wild) decision to legitimize all his bastards from his deathbed. There’s actually more than one Blackfyre Rebellion, and the events of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms take place in the shadow of the first. However, that doesn’t really become important until the second novella, The Sworn Sword. But the show’s more limited runtime means that’s quite literally a story for another day. A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms won’t have to pull forward material from later installments to pad out its runtime and instead can focus solely on the events of Martin’s first novella.“When I heard that it was going to be six episodes and they wanted to do shorter half-hour episodes, I was like, ‘Great.’ That means we can do one novella a season,” Parker said. “That means we can start the way that we’re supposed to start and just follow Dunk in his journey into this world. We can be ground up. We can be slow. We can be intimate and just give people a little enjoyment, a little treat inside this world.”In an entertainment landscape filled to bursting with projects that either try to stretch a six-episode story across 12 installments or try to cram five seasons’ worth of plot into a three-season run, this approach feels like a dream come true. And more series should take a lesson from that.A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms premieres Sunday, January 18 on HBO Max.The post A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms Will Have the Perfect Episodic Strategy appeared first on Den of Geek.