Sound the long-TV-show-title alarm! We got ourselves a very long one. During an earnings call on Friday, Warner Bros. Discovery Khal David Zaslav said that the conglomerate’s newest Game of Thrones spinoff, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms: The Hedge Knight, is in preproduction and on schedule to premiere in late 2025. It is currently early 2024, which gives the Zaslavians a year and a half to come up with a better title — and by that we mean a shorter title.
Here’s what’s wrong with the current one, as seen on the poster.
1.There are two The’s.
2. There is not an editor alive who’d approve a construction that included both A Knight and The Knight.
3. There are three different ways the letter o is styled on the poster.
4. Wait, no, there is a fourth in how they write “Golden Tooth” on the map.
To quote Gandalf, a character from a different franchise that eventually resulted in another too-long, clunky TV-show title (Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power), “You shall not pass.”
It doesn’t have to be this way. “HBO’s Girls” has 11 characters. You can comfortably type that in a group text. “HBO Original Game of Thrones A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms: The Hedge Knight” is SEVENTY-SEVEN characters and must be copied and pasted.
How did we get here?
Media companies are consolidating as media consumption is partitioning, resulting in networks clinging to their big IP that existed before the monoculture started shattering. There is really nothing we can do about that, which, again, is why we are just talking about fixing the show’s title. Culture might be crumbling, but it doesn’t have to be a headache to look at.
So let’s talk solutions: A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms: The Hedge Knight is a set of novellas from George R. R. Martin set in the world of A Song of Ice and Fire about the great knight Ser Duncan the Tall, or “Dunk,” and his squire, “Egg” (to give his real name is a spoiler). Later, the three stories — The Hedge Knight, The Sworn Sword, and The Mystery Knight — were collected into one volume titled, you guessed it, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms. Bing bang boom, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms becomes the main title and The Hedge Knight, as the beginning of the story, the subtitle. But it doesn’t have to be this way. The show was not called A Song of Ice and Fire: Game of Thrones. So, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms or The Hedge Knight could work as a new title. But why stop there? What about Dunk and Egg, which is what the project was referred to when it was being developed? Sounds fun and, more importantly, tonally different from the other installments of the franchise. How about Dunk!? The mind goes wild with curiosity and associations. Is it about donuts? Or, speaking of Ben Affleck, is it like his movie Air and the invention of dunking in freaking Westeros? You might be thinking, “Why not name the show Egg?” Great question. No reason. You can see it now:
HBO Original
Game of Thrones
Egg
