‘A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms’ is ‘Game of Thrones’ for the haters

Remember back in 2013, 2014, thereabouts? You’d be at a party, and someone would mention Game of Thrones, and the conversation would bubble along for a bit, but you’d already stopped paying attention because you were girding your loins, knowing what was about to happen, because it always happened? Like clockwork?

Namely: Someone in the group would snort with outsized, performative derision. “Uch, dragons,” they would say, rolling their eyes. “I don’t see how anyone could care about like, dragons and magic and all that made-up fantasy nonsense.” (They didn’t say “nonsense,” of course; they used another word.)

There have always been people who wear their disdain for the most popular aspects of pop culture as badges of honor, intelligence, discernment, etc. But I have good news for them: A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, premiering Sunday night on HBO, is a show for you.

Yes, it’s about a knight (Peter Claffey) and his squire (Dexter Sol Ansell) trying to make their way.

And yes, it’s set in the fantasy world of George R.R. Martin, on the continent of Westeros, where both Game of Thrones and its prequel, House of the Dragon, largely take place. And eventually the Targaryen family does show up, and they’re pretty much the same rich jerks they are in those other shows.

But that’s where the commonalities end. Instead of a sweeping, lore-dense epic filled with so many characters and locations that each episode needed to orient viewers with a world map (GoT) or a set of family trees (HotD), A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms requires no homework; it’s a small, grounded story you can watch it without a wiki open on your phone.

In fact, it’s easier to start by listing the stuff A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms doesn’t have, before getting to the stuff it does.

No magic. No dragons. No epic sweep. No maps. No internecine family trees. No sexual assault. No incestuous aristocrats. No female nudity. (Male nudity, however? Including some full frontal that’s … markedly um … full? Yep.) No “Bend the knee!” No vast armies somehow traversing entire continents on foot over a long weekend.

A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms is a comedy, far lighter, faster and breezier than the shows that preceded it.

But don’t get it twisted: This is still a show based on Martin’s fiction, and while it may not suffer from his above writerly tics, it doubles down on others: The only women with speaking parts are either sex workers or love interests. And those love interests swiftly get relegated to plot devices, as violence against them spurs our hero — who is, after all, a literal white knight — into action.

The fact that it feels so wholly and gratifyingly different than both GoT and HotD is the product of a combination of factors — length (just six episodes, each around 30 minutes or so), point of view (instead of rich ruling families, AKotSK is told from the perspective of Westeros’ commoners), scope (the entire series takes place over the course of a few days, entirely in one location — a jousting tournament) and, especially, tone.

A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms is a comedy, far lighter, faster and breezier than the shows that preceded it. Dunk (Claffey) is a hangdog underdog — a poor, sad-sack galoot who’s spent his adolescence and young adulthood squiring for a wandering knight (Danny Webb). When the knight dies, Dunk resolves to prove his worth by competing in a tournament. Dubbing himself Ser Duncan the Tall, he reluctantly accepts the help of Egg (Ansell), a young would-be squire who seems to know a lot more about the world of knight-errantry than his years would indicate.

Dunk is exactly the kind of simple, good-hearted character who gets swiftly ground into a bloody pulp by the gears of other Martin shows, which are so eager to establish, and re-establish, and re-re-establish, how very cruel and brutal the world of Westeros is. It’s no picnic here either — Dunk gets dutifully bullied by preening Targaryens and others — but Egg cannily helps him navigate his way around the dangers laid in his path. And that helps lighten the tone even further, admitting a sliver of hopefulness into Martin’s famously grim, merciless world.

Which, in fairness, is exactly what Martin’s slim Dunk and Egg novels do, too — A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms adapts the first of these, and here’s hoping we’ll get the others soon. Because as thrilling as it might be to brave the icy clutches of White Walkers, or the sulfurous fires of terrible dragons, it’s also nice to spend some time suspended between those two extremes — to find a mild, temperate place to watch some dudes in tin cans beat the snot out of each other.