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The first shot in A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms—the new, shorter, lighter spin-off from the Game of Thrones universe—is of three horses. Standing in the rain in front of a grassy hill bisected by a muddy track, one horse faces directly toward the camera, one a little out toward the viewer’s right (around 45 degrees) and one almost perpendicular to the first horse. It’s a well-composed shot that looks like a painting.
The second shot is much wider—the hill the horses are standing on is now on our left, with the horses revealed to be underneath a wizened tree toward the top of it, and on the right there’s a distant mountain, whose slope mirrors that of the closer hill, so that the bottom of each meet in the middle of the screen. At the bottom of the closer hill, under a marbled sky, a large figure digs. After a few shovelfuls, he trudges up the hill, lifts a body from the ground beside the horses, and turns to carry it back down to what we now know to be a grave.
This shot is very beautiful—unusually beautiful for a TV show, and especially one that’s been marketed as funnier and less serious than its predecessors. The time it’s given on screen—over 20 seconds, in which the camera does not move—is also highly unusual for a TV show, never mind a half-hour quasi-comedy. But it’s not unusual for A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms.
The show is funny—the first gag comes moments after the burial, and there are many more to come across its six-episode debut season. But it’s also extremely nice to look at, and the time it commits to being so nice to look at—through carefully-framed landscapes, but also the way a face is lit, or the way the camera will linger over a figure left alone in a tent—shows that it aims to be and cares about being beautiful in a way that not too much contemporary television could claim to match. It is, for my money, the most beautiful show currently on TV.
Why this matters is that it tells us a lot about the tone and the goals of the show. Game of Thrones wasn't ugly to look at, but its driving aesthetic philosophy was one of function. We saw what we needed to see for as long as we needed to see it, and then we saw the next thing, because Game of Thrones was trying to pack as much drama and scandal and intrigue as it possibly could into every episode.
A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms has its drama, but it’s less singularly focused on plot, and it has a lot less of it. Gone are the plethora of interweaving storylines; here instead is a simple story of a man of low birth aspiring toward the heights of knighthood, with a jousting tournament his means and a mysterious young boy his insistent helper.
The relationship between the boy (who goes by “Egg” and seems wise beyond his years) and the man (who goes by Ser Duncan the Tall, and is similarly believable in his obvious but not overwrought naiveté) is central to the show. And unlike almost every relationship in Game of Thrones it is not underlaid by a nakedly-Machiavellian exchange of power, but an endearingly innocent desire for companionship.
Their relationship is therefore allowed to be as beautiful as the world it exists within. In the final scene of episode one, Ser Duncan and Egg lie beneath a tree, which has to suffice as their shelter for the night in lieu of a castle or even a tent. A shooting star crosses the sky, and Egg tells Duncan that seeing one is good luck, and that all the other knights will be staring up at silk instead of sky. Perceiving this as a complaint about their situation, Duncan threatens Egg with a clout around the ear and tells him to go to sleep. But after a few moments of silence, a barely-visible change ripples over Duncan's face as he realises the implication of what he’s been told. “S-so the luck is ours alone?” he asks, hopefully. Egg smiles and closes his eyes to sleep. It sounds a little cheesy, and probably it is, but I'd defy anyone to watch the first episode and not be won over by that closing scene.
It’s a neat microcosm of the show. The pair’s quarters are far from glamorous, and as it progresses, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms certainly becomes more interested in showing what a medieval knight’s life looks like in all of its anti-glamorous reality, which is part of what prevents the show from becoming insubstantial or twee. But the camera, in this moment and throughout the series, is more interested in the silver lining, which is given an amount of time and space that something as a) positive and b) innocuous as a shooting star would rarely have been given in Game of Thrones.
Possibly that's because it's very hard to put something like a lucky shooting star, or anything similarly hopeful, in a TV show without it feeling saccharine and juvenile. If you're going to get away with it, you'll need something fairly grim to weigh it down. This is precisely why the mud and blood and brutality of Westeros is such a perfect opportunity for optimism. We're still firmly rooted in the gutter. But we're allowed a quick glance at the stars.
This story originally appeared in British GQ.