‘A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms’ is the Prettiest Show on TV

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.