Earlier today, we noted that the ever-forthright George R.R. Martin was out in the press trenches once more, doing promotional duties for his upcoming Westeros-set HBO series A Knight Of The Seven Kingdoms. That includes a big Hollywood Reporter profile Martin did this week, in which he’s nothing but glowing about AKOTSK showrunner Ira Parker, calling him “terrific,” and adding that he “seems to have the same priorities I do.” Said praise arrives in sharp contrast to Martin’s very bitter (if obviously restrained by desperate pleading from Warner Bros. Discovery PR) comments about the other showrunner currently adapting his work: Ryan Condal, who’s gearing up for a third season of Game Of Thrones prequel series House Of The Dragon—despite Martin’s pretty obvious feelings on the matter.
Martin’s relationship with Condal is, by his own words, not just “rocky, but abysmal.” It’s clear from the profile that the author—who voiced some very public (if also, to our eyes, fairly esoteric) complaints about HOTD‘s second season in a now-deleted blog post in 2024—feels a degree of pretty serious betrayal from Condal. “I hired Ryan,” he says in the profile, which notes that Martin backed Condal when he got into a battle with his season 1 co-showrunner, Game Of Thrones directing vet Miguel Sapochnik. “I thought Ryan and I were partners. And we were all through the first season. I would read early drafts of the scripts. I would give notes. He would change some things. It was working really well—I thought.”
But things took a turn once Condal took over as sole showrunner for the show’s second season. Martin: “He basically stopped listening to me. I would give notes, and nothing would happen. Sometimes he would explain why he wasn’t doing it. Other times, he would tell me, ‘Oh, OK, yeah, I’ll think about that.’ It got worse and worse, and I began to get more and more annoyed. Finally, it got to a point where I was told by HBO that I should submit all my notes to them and they would give Ryan our combined notes.” Martin took to the internet, writing a post (while the season was in the middle of airing) in which he called Condal’s changes to his canon (mostly about excising certain minor-to-our-eyes, but clearly dear to their creator, characters from the author’s 700-page Fire And Blood) “toxic,” and promising five more such essays to come. Instead, he got calls to his managers from freaked-out HBO executives, the blog post was yanked from the internet, and Martin is now very careful about what he says about the show in public. The THR piece goes so far as to say that, after a highly contentious Zoom call between the two men, Martin was asked to step back from the show entirely. He’s since apparently rejoined the series in some capacity, but, again, “I can’t talk about it.”
All told, it’s a pretty wild position for an author to be in with the network he’s been making untold millions of dollars for for a decade and a half at this point, especially when he’s also busy talking about what a nice time he’s having with their other show based on his books. (Condal, for his part, gave a statement to EW last year in which he said that, “I made every effort to include George in the adaptation process. I really did… But at some point, he just became unwilling to acknowledge the practical issues at hand in a reasonable way.”) Martin has never made apologies for being a hardliner on the topic of changes made to original texts in the adaptation process—he hates it, and he won’t be shy about it. But it also feels like, if you’re HBO, managing George R.R. Martin’s feelings should probably be a literal full-time job, given how both profitable and cantankerous he can be. Seeing that process break down is fascinating, even if we can’t necessarily join Martin in his outrage at the excising of certain tertiary Targaryens.
