In episode 6, a woman who is 9 months pregnant races her husband on a dragon. You see, when you try to present a story as dark, serious, and mature, a scene this cartoonish simply takes you out of the experience completely. Makes you wonder how serious the writers are about the plot.

There isn't a single character that hooks you in. Many of the characters just aren't convincing. Kind of hard to follow a medieval series that has characters who are just obviously from 2022 with some goofy costumes on.

From the way many of the dialogues are carried out to even the way folks look. Something is just missing, and that's okay ... it's probably a difficult thing to pull off. I will say that the King's hand Hightower is easily the most convincing character, but that's where it ends.

Production quality is top-tier but it doesn't mean anything if you can't resonate with the viewers. The plot is a whole lot of nothing, which wouldn't be so bad if the side dialogue was intriguing like in GOT.

At the end of the day, I'm clearly in the minority here judging by the average user scores. After watching the likes of Breaking Bad, The Sopranos, GOT 1-7, Deadwood, and other high quality series, I have very high standards and my spidey senses for mediocrity are superb. I really don't have time for anything but the best of the best. I had hoped HOD would get the job done, but alas, it wasn't meant to be.

Edit after season one finale:

It actually gets quite good and characters become a little more believable. Still missing something in my opinion. Production quality is really insane, better than GOT. Sadly, the dialogue isn't quite there.