House of the Dragon showrunner Ryan Condal explains why some episodes are too dark to see

HBO’s Game of Thrones spin-off, House of the Dragon, has concluded its first season run. The mega-hit became the premium movie channel’s biggest premiere ever and had reeled in millions of viewers and streamers each week. Now that the show has reached its season finale, Deadline sits down with Ryan Condal, the showrunner, for a few words over his reflection on the much-anticipated follow-up to the George R.R. Martin phenomenon.

Condal addresses a lot of topics, including the much-maligned dark episodes that have viewers complaining about the lack of visibility. When asked about it, Condal explains,

“The difference between making television and making movies is when you make a movie, you calibrate the thing that you’re making, the master file for this idealized movie theater experience. You know it’s going to go into a professionally calibrated environment, run by a professional projectionist on a professional sound system. The problem with making television is you do all of that, you make the show on millions of dollars worth of equipment. You make this perfect file in a perfect environment and on great equipment that’s perfectly calibrated by professionals. And then you release it into the wild, and it goes to different distributors who compress the file differently. Some air it in 4k, some in 10 EP, some over-crank the brightness, some under-crank the brightness, some make the sound different. You’re also releasing it to tens of millions of different television sets that are all different technology, calibrated differently and set up differently in different viewing environments. It’s almost impossible to account for all those variables when you’re making the television show. So yes, I heard the note and we’re aware. But I will tell you that it looked phenomenal when we posted it and released it. And it looked great on my television, which has been professionally calibrated. [Laughs].”

House of the Dragon season one can now be streamed in its entirety on HBO Max.