Having achieved notoriety with a famous Game of Thrones episode that was so dark no one could make out what was happening, HBO Max has just done the same thing again with prequel House of the Dragon.
GoT’s epic Season 8 Episode 3, The Long Night, unfortunately turned out to be precisely that back when it first aired in 2019; a symphony of muddy hues that hid as much as it revealed of director Miguel Sapochnik’s epic battle sequences. Banding was rife and in the States, where HBO and HBO Max streamed the show in something close to 5Mbps, no-one could see a thing.
We did a bit of comparison with the size of files of the UK transmission on a SkyQ box at the time and noted that the quality of the HD download far surpassed what was broadcast. The 'live' recording occupied 3.5GB, the download 8.3GB, and even that was murky compared to what Sapochnik and his team would have seen in the grading suite.
But, y'know, lessons learned and all that sort of thing. There's no way they would do that again. Until that's precisely what happened once more in the prequel House of Dragon episode 7 that aired this weekend. Here's a pic that accompanies the BBC's article on the fuss that has ensued.
Yeah, you have to say that's a bit murky. There are plenty of other pics from the episode too that look worse.
HBO defended the dark as it did back in 2019. "We appreciate you reaching out about a night scene in House of the Dragon: Episode 7 appearing dark on your screen," it tweeted multiple times in reply to viewer comments. "The dimmed lighting of this scene was an intentional creative decision."
Well, sort of. That will have something to do with it as will the fact that most people at home aren't watching House of the Dragon on a reference monitor in a grading suite. A lack of bandwidth will likely have contributed too - and that's at both ends, both in terms of the home viewers' pipeline and the amount that HBO thinks it can get away squeezing its shows down into. Plus of course there's the fact that not everyone watches TV in the dark, TVs can be calibrated any which way, and so on and so forth. Or it could just be that Sapochnik eats huge amounts of carrots and can see in the dark.
(Actually, we're rather taken with Kathryn VanArendonk's viewpoint in The Vulture that it could be a day-for-night shoot gone horribly, horribly wrong.)
The point is that once is unfortunate, two looks bad, and two three years apart verges on the sloppy. More people are watching 4K HDR and demanding better visuals all the time and, as streaming services know all too well, dissatisfaction with picture quality is one of the key factors likely to make people turn off. In an increasingly competitive market you need all the eyeballs you can get and you need to keep them entertained. Hell, even when the The Rings of Power was at its fearsome dullest during its first five episodes you could still see what's going on.
You just have to hope that history at HBO isn't repeating itself too much and that the ending of this season of House of the Dragon won't be similar to the way Game of Thrones signed off. Bad pictures are one thing; bad television is another level entirely.