The next Game of Thrones spin-off gets the director Black Mirror’s best episode – and it’s going to be a shorter series

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We’re getting some exciting news from Westeros: the director of arguably the best Black Mirror episodes has joined A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms as its lead director.

The director in question is Owen Harris, who directed Be Right Back and San Junipero, some of the most interesting and heartbreaking episodes of the dystopian drama. And Harris is now executive producer and lead director of the Thrones spin-off, directing the first three episodes.

The news was broken by The Hollywood Reporter, which also has details of the seasons’ episode count: this show, it says, should be “a tighter opener than the 10-episode first seasons of Game of Thrones and House of the Dragon.”

How many episodes of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms will there be?

By GoT standards this season is going to be very short: season one will be just six episodes long. That makes sense when you consider the source material, though: where George RR Martin’s novels often come close to 1,000 pages, this show is based on his novella The Hedge Knight – and that comes in at a positively teeny 160 pages.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, the The Hedge Knight bit of the title has now been dropped: instead of being called the rather clunky A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms: The Hedge Knight, the show will now be the shorter A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms. That may change again, the publication says, but “it’s where things currently stand.”

The new show is set a century before the events of Game of Thrones, and follows the young knight Ser Duncan the Tall and his squire, Egg. The actors for both parts have been cast: Peter Claffey from Vikings and Valhalla will play Ser, and Dexter Sol Ansell from The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes will be Egg. The tone is expected to be lighter than the more epic seasons we’ve seen from the Thrones universe, and it’s expected to land among the best Max shows in 2025.