How House of the Dragon is stacking up against Game of Thrones for Emmys

The blood of the dragon isn't pumping so strong in this year's Emmys race.

House of the Dragon received eight Emmy nominations, as announced by the Television Academy on Wednesday. And, in a surprising show, the Game of Thrones prequel series was shut out of all the major drama categories, except for Outstanding Drama Series.

Despite buzzy performances from Paddy Considine, Emma D'Arcy, Matt Smith, and Olivia Cooke, none of the actors received nominations. Outside of the Best Drama nod, House of the Dragon received nominations in a slew of technical and craft categories: Outstanding Production Design for a Narrative Period or Fantasy Program (One Hour or More), Outstanding Cinematography, Outstanding Fantasy/Sci-Fi Costumes, Outstanding Period and/or Character Makeup, Outstanding Prosthetic Makeup, Outstanding Sound Editing for a Comedy or Drama Series (One Hour), and Outstanding Special Visual Effects in a Season or a Movie.

Separately, the Inside the Episode features that followed each episode with behind-the-scenes insights from the cast and crew received a nomination for Outstanding Short Form Nonfiction or Reality Series.

This follows House of the Dragon's Golden Globe win for Best Drama Series, Golden Globe nomination for D'Arcy (adult Princess Rhaenyra Targaryen), three BAFTA TV Awards, one Screen Actors Guild nomination, and three Critics Choice Award nominations.

A big question ahead of the 2022 season 1 premiere of House of the Dragon was whether people would care as much as they did for Game of Thrones, especially after the original show's divisive final season. But the spin-off, set during the heyday of the Targaryen empire hundreds of years before Kit Harington's Jon Snow came on the scene, drew in an immense viewership for HBO. Can House of the Dragon still become the Emmys juggernaut that Game of Thrones became, even with a slow start?

Game of Thrones debuted in April 2011 on HBO, and that same year it received 13 Emmy nominations, including for Outstanding Drama Series. But it only won two awards at the time: for that banger of a main titles design and Peter Dinklage's supporting performance as Tyrion Lannister. Of course, the show would go on to rack up 159 career Emmy nominations and 59 career Emmy wins. House of the Dragon isn't there yet.

Unlike Game of Thrones, however, House of the Dragon is also coming into Emmy voting in a new kind of landscape, in which it's competing alongside other networks' answer to Game of Thrones (i.e. their own prestige blockbuster genre series). Amazon's got The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, which received six Emmy nominations in its debut year; and Disney has The Mandalorian, which received nine Emmy noms for its third season.

And then there's HBO's own The Last of Us, which quickly became a contender for "the next Game of Thrones" and rivaled House of the Dragon's viewership — with two Game of Thrones veterans in the lead roles, Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey. That show dominated all the drama categories, receiving a total of 24 Emmy nominations this year. It's a crowded awards season for genre projects, and time will tell if House of the Dragon can cut through the noise.

Season 2 is currently in production with a projected premiere sometime in 2024.

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