How do you follow up a show that defined a decade? Game of Thrones was the essential series of the 2010s, a rare return to appointment television in the age of asynchronous streaming and the first time fantasy on TV was grown-up enough to attract a broad mainstream audience. It won 59 Emmys — a new record for a drama — and was drawing in more than 44mn viewers per episode by its conclusion.

Its successor, House of the Dragon, has some big iron boots to fill. Based on George RR Martin’s 2018 fantastical history book Fire and Blood, it is set about 150 years before Thrones and details the outbreak of the civil war that led to the downfall of the great House Targaryen, ancestors of fan favourite Daenerys, played memorably by Emilia Clarke. When the first season aired in 2022, fans wondered if this prequel would emulate Thrones’ excellent early seasons or its notoriously flubbed finale, and were relieved to find that Dragon delivered the goods. Its debut was HBO’s most watched ever, and the series won the Golden Globe for Best Drama in 2023. Now, with its second season due to begin on June 16, many are wondering whether it will make good on that early promise.

Martin’s umbrella series, A Song of Ice and Fire, has a feverishly dedicated fandom, so the House of the Dragon creators had to think hard about how to satisfy them. Thrones marked the first (and perhaps only) time that fantasy entered the realms of prestige television — it was Succession with dragons, House of Cards with sword fights, The Sopranos with incest. And it had the ingredients to please everybody: political intrigue, spectacular action, rich character drama, thrilling twists, lavish production design and, above all, plenty of sex and violence.