How to Make House of the Dragon’s Dark Episode Easier to See
Filmmakers are artists as much as they are photographers, painters, and sculptors, so they have a degree of creative freedom over the content they produce. However, with the advent of big-budget streaming, some filmmakers may not be able to ensure that everything they make is as viewable as they would hope compared to the perfect setting of a movie theater.
The seventh episode of House of the Dragon entitled “Driftmark” is one such example. The show’s director, Emmy Award-winner Miguel Sapochnik, specifically chose an extremely dark subject for much of the episode. For many viewers at home, this meant long periods of little actual action on screen.
Fans have complained about it online, and HBO has confirmed it was a conscious decision.
Most TVs that have come out in recent years have some version of HDR support, and that’s where we need to start. HDR, which stands for High Dynamic Range, takes the previous standard video format – Standard Dynamic Range or SDR – and expands it to include more colors and shades. HDR content allows for brighter whites and darker blacks, as well as a wider range of colors – like more reds, greens, and blues.
There are many HDR profiles, meaning you’ll see something different depending on which one your TV can read and what content is being streamed in. The one HBO uses is a proprietary one called Dolby Vision. Dolby Vision HDR aims to streamline the previously chaotic HDR experience and ensure everyone sees essentially the same thing. It’s a good goal, but with so many differences between panel technologies, it just kind of puts everyone in the general ballpark and not necessarily the same seating area.
As a result, even if you and I are both watching a Dolby Vision stream, our experiences won’t necessarily be the same. Still, in this case, we both probably had a pretty grim experience.
Fortunately, Dolby Vision has a few user-level adjustments that can be made to it. Combined with a few other settings that are fairly easy to adjust, you can greatly enhance your viewing experience of this particularly dark episode. All of this is not too difficult either.
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