Game of Thrones, the TV series, was made great, at least the first four to five seasons, by Martin's (and Martin-inspired) amazing, witty and creative dialogue delivered by the wonderful cast. The books are also completely resting on the greatness of interpersonal relationships and dialogue while being essentially quite weak fantasy. In fact, I would go so far and argue that Martin wanted to write books about political intrigue and aristocratic families and added fantasy only as an outer shell to make it more colorful. This is important to understand to see why the later B&W seasons failed miserably - illogical character development, ludicrous storylines and weak, charmless dialogue. House of the Dragon, so far, tries to steer clear of ill logic but delivers the same weak, charmless dialogue. This is understandable because dialogue makes or breaks books, films and TV series and is arguably the most difficult aspect of writing to master. The cast is middling with some real duds like Matt Smith who is appropriately charmless, but also annoying and not nearly menacing enough. Paddy Considine's Viserys is bloodless and uninteresting, Toussaint's Corlys likewise. Milly Alcock's Rhaenyra Targaryen is the only interesting character of the lot, although clearly based on Cersei Lannister and the cliched (but often true) tropes of underestimated and ignored women. What is less understandable to me is the often atrocious CGI. Just go and rewatch the knights' tourney in episode 1 and marvel at the 2-dimensional people in the stands, at times completely warped perspective and ridiculously bad level of detail.