2024 Is the Year of Royal Court Drama

It’s both comforting and a little depressing to realize that, for all the boundary-pushing, budget-raising expansions of the television medium over the past few decades, we haven’t really found a more compelling font of drama than two people standing in a room arguing about their conflicting desires. Sure, you can reduce nearly all scripted media to this watered-down description of the basic function of drama, but if Succession—one of the best received television shows of late—has proven anything, it’s that audiences want to see people with power argue about who deserves it more. 

To promote the premiere of House of the Dragon Season 2, the social media accounts for various HBO and Warner Bros. properties announced their fealty to Rhaenyra (#TeamBlack) or Alicent (#TeamGreen). It should come to no surprise that House Roy swore allegiance to Team Green, as both shows are about the same thing: slighted heirs revolting against a more sensible, if dubious, consolidation of power. At the end of the day, audiences are still willing to turn up to the courts of kings and queens, where vices overpower righteousness, and pick sides.

If Succession is about a modern day “royal court,” 2024 has already offered an embarrassment of historical riches. Mary & George at Starz was an erotically-charged, venom-tongued look at the schemers for King James I’s favor. FX’s Shōgun intricately assembled a dynasty in a feuding feudal Japan. House of the Dragon may not have actually happened, but rarely have we been invited so closely into the war rooms of Westeros as these two seasons have given us. (To be honest, your average TV viewer knows more about these fictional families than real monarchs.) 

In the opening four episodes that have screened for critics, Alicent and Rhaenrya’s forces argue amongst themselves in council chambers and intimate asides. In the series, the “Dance of the Dragons” civil war is triggered by moments of explosive violence but can be best understood as the manifestation of an adolescence spent watching divisions sprout between those you trusted and coping with alliances with those who mean nothing to you.

It’s a show about resentment and betrayal, but on a smaller scale than the outbursts and violence would let you believe. It reveals the pettiness of ruling Westeros to a far deeper degree than Game of Thrones, where complacency with power and insecurity over legacy turns you into someone you might never have been if you weren’t in the spotlight. This means there are plenty of scenes of learned advisors schooling impetuous youth and heirs stomping their feet and protesting that nothing’s fair. Everyone’s a giant baby and a raging sociopath at the same time, and it’s thrilling, delicious stuff.

It’s also a brilliant case study for why the court drama (we’re using the term to refer to the court of a king or queen rather than the legal area of Presumed Innocent or the athletic domain of Challengers…) is so delightful. We get to indulge in a fantasy of power and honor while also taking full advantage of the distance between the television and the couch we’re watching it from. We are permitted to lean in and lean back from the excitement and folly of the royal court at the same time; even though these elites hold more power than everyone else in the show, they’re no match for the judgment of the ultimate overseeing voyeur: the viewer.

It’s also noteworthy that all the court dramas we’ve seen this year have boosted prestige-sized budgets, starry casts, and plenty of detailed effects. Period dramas are always more likely to be pricey event television rather than soaps or procedurals, but the type of drama that excites us most in House of the Dragon and Shōgun is inexpensive. 

The TV format traditionally was made cheaper to be watched on lower quality screens, and originally evolved from radio—meaning drama had to be clearly telegraphed in dialogue, performance, and description over the visual language of cinema. (Radio drama, with its foley sound effects and technical audio workarounds, also marked an evolution of theater that TV drama inherited and ran with.) All this to say that standing in a room with people who hold power that you desire or that threatens your own isn’t just satisfying in its simplicity, it’s a style of storytelling that was borne out of generations of creative necessity: commercial 20th century drama has always needed to access the largest stakes on a smaller scale. 

While domestic radio dramas and TV serials chose to keep their scope small when they were being broadcast into ordinary people’s homes, soon the burgeoning reach of color television lined up with the ambition of historical literature. A tome like James Clavell’s Shōgun or Alex Haley’s Roots told big stories that could be easily translated into episodic formats and dramatic, dialogue-driven scenes—as they had been for decades on radio and in novel form—but now we could tangibly, believably have it realized in front of us, letting us lean in further to the vicarious-but-removed thrills. 

Royal court dramas need to be more intricately, and therefore slowly, written than formula-dependent syndicated shows—audiences can easily become confused by the on-and-off-screen characters if the conspiracies and schemes aren’t carefully designed and deployed. Shōgun balanced its perspectives masterfully: our white European protagonist’s status as a pawn for the daimyos is emboldened across the episodes, pushing him into a place of instability as we watch Lord Toronaga lay out a plan, put it into practice, and then watch his enemies take the bait and do exactly what he thinks they will. If we’re lucky, we also get to see his enemy Lord Ishido go, “Are we sure we aren’t being played here?” for extra catharsis.

It’s not easy to pull off without years of dedicated work, which, in a streaming dominated landscape, is more likely to mean overworked writers and dismal pay. But the good court dramas are built to last and serve as blueprints for successive ones. BBC’s landmark 1976 miniseries I, Claudius, charting a blackly comic look at the start of the Roman Empire, was the benchmark for Ancient Rome programming before HBO’s Rome, which again served almost like a proof-of-concept for the vision of Game of Thrones.

The finesse of pulling off a stunning court drama is probably why so many adaptations of fantasy classics have stalled in the wake of Game of Thrones. The goal is not to adapt the most epic story with the most devoted fanbase, but to make an alien world stunningly accessible with intrigue, pathos, and drama. Game of Thrones worked, at least in the first four seasons, because it reminded us more of Classical and Medieval archetypes and stories, and being grounded in the intricacies of power and the blindspots of humanity is the lifeblood of the court drama.

We’re living in a moment where blockbuster-scaled event television is starting to chip—we simply cannot fund 20 $200 million shows every year and expect them all to be worth our time. On the other hand, reality television has synchronized with online culture to an insane degree, and it’s a format that feels in direct conversation with court dramas—both genres tackle the dangers of narcissist plotting and taking power struggles really personally.

We don’t want to be dazzled with spectacle, we want to be in a room with two people who hate each other, but are bound by power structures that prevent them from bursting into expensive action. They instead must talk, spit, intimidate—they must be dragons who are forced to dance. If House of the Dragon’s inherent cattiness and surface emotions feed us the same good food as a Vanderpump Rules reunion, we may have found the recipe for historical fantasy epics sticking around as the Peak TV Empire crumbles.

Rory Doherty is a screenwriter and culture writer based in Edinburgh, Scotland. He contributes to Inverse, Vulture, British GQ, and others. You can follow him at @roryhasopinions.

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