2022 Was a Year of TV Prequels; Here’s a Report Card on How They Did
Movie prequels have been around at least as long as Butch and Cassidy: The Early Years (1975) or The Adventures of Young Sherlock Holmes (1985). Still, when Phantom Menace came out in 1999, George Lucas presented it as a bold new horizon for filmmaking.
That promise was a corporate vision, not a creative one. Lucas was sometimes the artist who made THX 1138, sometimes a purveyor of cheap plastic toys, and always a tinkerer. He made no secret of “moichandising” and his desire to turn Star Wars into an endless source of profit. To the industry, Star Wars’ first prequel looked like a shiny rollout of stratagems to reuse and recycle massive franchises. Give the people what they want.
To everyone else, it looked like surgeons cutting into healthy flesh. Rooting around in the past of a well-rounded story can break its bones. More so than a bad sequel, a bad prequel can force you to reconsider what you liked about the original to begin with. Vader’s image, for instance, never quite recovered in the public’s imagination.
But 2022 went for it. This year, Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, and Game of Thrones all went under the knife. Unprecedented levels of cash and labor flowed into franchising the history of those universes. Millions of dollars and man hours later, it’s worth spending a few moments to reflect on the results of the year’s prequel series, and examine their seams.
House of the Dragon
It’s clear that HBO wants a do-over.
The re-staging of the show’s Season 1 finale is deliberate. It may be set 172 years before King Robert’s reign, but a white-haired queen once again holds court on an island fortress (quite a familiar island fortress) and plots to retake her throne from a common usurper. When Rhaenyra’s subjects crown her in Episode 10, “Black Queen,” the music swells and the camera lingers on her reverent subjects. Later in that same episode, her aunt delivers an on-the-nose speech which basically amounts to “In Rhaenyra We Trust.” It positions Rhaenyra as a surrogate for adrift positive feelings about that other Targaryen girl, whose heel turn was so low (and her appeal so high) that even U.S. senators complained about it.
To that end, Rhaenyra’s arc is a whirlwind tour of Daenerys’ character beats. Daenerys’ transformation from a chattel princess to emancipated regent took around three seasons. Rhaenyra does it in 10 episodes. For hard lessons about sex and power, Daenerys had multiple teachers: her brother Viserys, Khal Drogo, and Jorah, among others. House of the Dragon conflates those into one mentor, her uncle Daemon.
She’s not well-rounded. She’s a hasty sketch supplemented by our comfort with the original Thrones, and she’s just an example of this canny shorthand. House of the Dragon is trying to core its sister show, cutting out the divisive zombie apocalypse bookends and retaining the juicy, soapy drama within King’s Landing.
It’s leaning into an established framework of Thrones lore, traveling quickly over the known to reach the unknown. Discarding the existential crisis costs the franchise some poignance, pushing the House of the Dragon closer to the endless gyres of a soap opera. Still, the overall approach seems economical and HBO’s veteran status in this arena is definitely felt. As I’ve mentioned in the past, HBO has been creating in this niche for a while.
Yet you can’t really substitute audience knowledge for time spent organically on character development. Its compression fails. Rhaenyra’s coronation feels hollow and unearned. She, and House of the Dragon as a whole, remains a sketch.
And that’s a shame because there are details which display serious ingenuity. House of the Dragon and Martin have created a rich composite of countless real-life dynasties. The Targaryen imperial family tree is convincingly knotty. It’s full of personal indiscretions, dead-ends, dark horses, and obscure relations ignored until they become politically valuable. Sometimes this creates confusion (“Who are they? What’s their claim again?”), but that’s a bewilderment known to anyone who looks at the Tudor family tree.
Whenever House of the Dragon explores those angles, it’s promising. Viserys’ last meal, for instance, is a cracker of a scene and undergirded by some real narrative power. Whenever it looks backward, it turns into a pillar of salt.
Prequel Strategy: Recycle
Grade: C+
Kenobi
Kenobi is Star Wars’ first stab at an MCU-esque spinoff show, and the result is mixed. Its first half promises a quasi-thriller which turns out to be toothless. It doesn’t help that we now have Andor, a more dedicated political thriller which would stand out even without the Star Wars label. Judge it as a prequel in a long line of prequels, however, and it fares a bit better.
Usually it’s another Solo, a hodgepodge of answers to questions we never asked. There are some unexpected delights, such as Haja (Kumail Nanjiani), a grifter posing as a Jedi. Haja is a clever bit of worldbuilding in a series that often struggles with it—a sign that its society is responding to the absence of the Jedi in complex ways.
Furthermore, there are scenes which give necessary closure. Kenobi’s (in)famous parting words to Vader on Mustafar always felt like half of a conversation. From Phantom Menace to Revenge of the Sith, Anakin Skywalker (and Hayden Christensen’s unfortunate performance) was an emotional dead zone, but the loss of his brother-in-arms should have evoked some pathos. If nothing else, Kenobi delivers that.
Still, the big picture takeaway doesn’t make this show more meaningful. These contributions are too negligible to sustain anything more than a faint curiosity. At its best, Kenobi is restoration work. It’s putting a bit of blush on some wooden characters and smoothes out a few curves. At its worst, it’s a Post-it note slapped on someone else’s work. A parasite.
Prequel Strategy: Restoration
Grade: C-
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