“House of the Dragon” has spent three seasons dominating the fantasy conversation, and it’s easy to see why — dragons, court intrigue, a slow-motion civil war between siblings who used to trust each other. But the genre’s current boom didn’t start or end with Westeros. Streaming platforms have quietly built out an entire library of fantasy television that rivals anything HBO is doing, some of it wrapped up already, some of it still unfolding. Here are eight shows worth clearing space for, complete with cast, story, category, where to stream, who’s behind the camera, and every season currently available.
‘A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms‘ (2025–present)
Set roughly a century before the events of “Game of Thrones,” “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms” trades sprawling war for something far smaller and quieter. The show follows Ser Duncan the Tall, known simply as Dunk, a towering but green hedge knight who picks up a mysterious young squire named Egg along the way. Together they wander the Seven Kingdoms taking odd jobs, settling small disputes and occasionally stumbling into trouble that’s bigger than either of them realizes.
Peter Claffey plays Dunk and Dexter Sol Ansell plays Egg, with Danny Webb, Sam Spruell and Finn Bennett rounding out the supporting cast. The series falls into medieval fantasy territory, but it’s closer to a character-driven coming-of-age story than a war epic — one of the more deliberate creative choices the show’s creative team made, given how easy it would have been to simply chase “Game of Thrones” scale.
Owen Harris directs, with Ira Parker serving as showrunner alongside original series creator George R.R. Martin, whose “Tales of Dunk and Egg” novellas provide the source material. The show streams on HBO Max, with Season 1 currently available and additional installments expected to continue adapting Martin’s novellas.
‘Interview with the Vampire‘ (2022–present)
AMC’s “Interview with the Vampire” took Anne Rice’s classic novel and rebuilt it from the ground up for a modern audience, and the results have been some of the most acclaimed genre television of the last several years. The story follows Louis de Pointe du Lac recounting his life to journalist Daniel Molloy decades after the fact — specifically, his complicated, often devastating relationship with the vampire who turned him, Lestat de Lioncourt.
Jacob Anderson stars as Louis, with Sam Reid as Lestat and Eric Bogosian as Daniel. Bailey Bass originated the role of Claudia in Season 1 before Delainey Hayles took over the part for Season 2, and Assad Zaman joined as Armand. The show sits comfortably in gothic horror territory, using its vampire mythology as a lens for questions about power, obsession, addiction and identity that go well beyond typical genre fare.
Rolin Jones serves as showrunner, with directors including Alan Taylor and Levan Akin contributing episodes across the show’s run. It streams on AMC+, with episodes also available through Netflix in a number of international markets. Season 1 aired in 2022, Season 2 in 2024, and a third season is confirmed and currently in production.
‘The Witcher‘ (2019–present)
Andrzej Sapkowski’s novels got their big streaming adaptation with “The Witcher,” which follows Geralt of Rivia, a mutated monster hunter navigating a politically fractured continent alongside the powerful sorceress Yennefer and Ciri, a princess whose latent magical abilities make her a target for nearly everyone in the world.
The show made headlines when Henry Cavill, who originated the role of Geralt, departed after Season 3, with Liam Hemsworth stepping into the part starting with Season 4. Anya Chalotra continues as Yennefer, Freya Allan as Ciri, and Joey Batey as the bard Jaskier, whose comic relief has become one of the show’s most reliably popular elements.
Lauren Schmidt Hissrich has served as showrunner across the entire run. The series streams on Netflix, with four seasons currently available and a fifth and final season confirmed to close out Geralt’s story, adapting the remainder of Sapkowski’s source material. Whatever your feelings on the Cavill-to-Hemsworth transition, the show’s world-building and creature design have remained a consistent strength throughout.
‘Avatar: The Last Airbender‘ (2024–present)
Netflix took on one of the more beloved animated series of the 2000s with its live-action adaptation of “Avatar: The Last Airbender,” following Aang, the last surviving Airbender and the reincarnated Avatar, as he works to master all four elements while trying to stop the Fire Nation’s century-long war against the rest of the world.
Gordon Cormier plays Aang, with Kiawentiio as Katara, Ian Ousley as Sokka, Dallas Liu as Zuko, and Paul Sun-Hyung Lee as the wise and weary Uncle Iroh. The show falls into elemental fantasy adventure territory, built around a mythology of bending — the ability to manipulate water, earth, fire or air — that gives the series a distinct visual identity compared to most Western fantasy shows.
Albert Kim serves as showrunner, with Jabbar Raisani among the directors working on the series. It streams on Netflix, with Season 1 released in 2024 and Season 2, subtitled “Book 2: Earth,” set to arrive in 2026 — widely expected to be the stronger of the two seasons, since the corresponding stretch of the original animated series is often considered its best.
‘Percy Jackson and the Olympians‘ (2023–present)
Rick Riordan’s beloved young-adult novels finally got the adaptation many fans had been asking for with Disney+’s “Percy Jackson and the Olympians,” which follows 12-year-old Percy Jackson as he discovers he’s a demigod son of Poseidon and sets off on a cross-country quest to prevent an all-out war among the Greek gods.
Walker Scobell plays Percy, with Leah Sava Jeffries as Annabeth Chase and Aryan Simhadri as Grover Underwood, the trio at the heart of the series. The show also boasts a stacked roster of gods played by recognizable faces, including Lin-Manuel Miranda, Jason Mantzoukas and Adam Copeland. It sits in Greek mythology-based young-adult fantasy, aimed at a slightly younger audience than most of the shows on this list but still built with enough craft to hold up for older viewers too.
Jonathan E. Steinberg serves as showrunner, with Riordan himself deeply involved as a writer and executive producer — a detail that’s helped the show earn a reputation among fans as unusually faithful to its source material. Season 1 streamed in 2023 and 2024, and Season 2, adapting “The Sea of Monsters,” is set for release in 2026, on Disney+.
‘His Dark Materials‘ (2019–2022)
Philip Pullman’s acclaimed trilogy got a complete, three-season adaptation in HBO’s “His Dark Materials,” following Lyra Belacqua, a girl living in a parallel version of Oxford where every human is bonded to an animal companion called a daemon, as she uncovers a conspiracy involving stolen children, parallel universes and a mysterious particle known as Dust.
Dafne Keen stars as Lyra, with Ruth Wilson as the icy, manipulative Mrs. Coulter and James McAvoy as Lord Asriel. Amir Wilson joins later in the story as Will Parry, whose arc becomes just as central as Lyra’s own. The series falls into parallel-world fantasy with a heavy philosophical bent, tackling questions of free will, organized religion and coming of age in ways that set it apart from more straightforward adventure fantasy.
Jack Thorne served as head writer and executive producer across the entire run, with multiple directors, including Otto Bathurst and Jamie Childs, contributing episodes. The series streams on HBO Max. Unlike most of the shows on this list, “His Dark Materials” already has a complete, satisfying ending — Season 1 aired in 2019 and 2020, Season 2 in late 2020, and Season 3 in 2022, wrapping up all three of Pullman’s novels in full.
‘Shadow and Bone‘ (2021–2023)
Leigh Bardugo’s Grishaverse novels came to Netflix with “Shadow and Bone,” set in the war-torn nation of Ravka and centered on Alina Starkov, an orphaned mapmaker who discovers she’s the long-prophesied Sun Summoner — a rare, powerful Grisha capable of destroying the Shadow Fold, the monster-infested darkness splitting her country in half. Running alongside Alina’s story is a crew of outlaws known as the Crows, whose heist-driven subplot became just as popular with fans as the main narrative.
Jessie Mei Li plays Alina, with Archie Renaux as her childhood friend Malyen “Mal” Oretsev and Ben Barnes as General Kirigan, also known as the Darkling. Freddy Carter, Amita Suman and Kit Young round out the Crows as Kaz, Inej and Jesper, respectively. The show is grimdark fantasy through and through, unafraid to let its characters make morally messy choices in a world where survival often comes at a cost.
Eric Heisserer served as showrunner and writer across the series. It streams on Netflix, with Season 1 released in 2021 and Season 2 in 2023. Netflix ultimately canceled the show after Season 2, along with a planned “Six of Crows” spinoff that had reportedly already been scripted — a decision that remains a sore point for fans, since the story ends on real cliffhangers rather than a natural conclusion. Still, two seasons is more than enough to justify a watch, especially for fans of morally gray heist plots layered into a bigger fantasy war.
‘The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power‘ (2022–present)
Amazon’s enormous bet on Tolkien’s world, “The Rings of Power” is set thousands of years before the events of “The Lord of the Rings,” tracking the forging of the titular Rings of Power and the slow, calculated rise of the dark lord Sauron across Middle-earth. The show juggles multiple storylines at once, from Galadriel’s relentless hunt for Sauron to the founding of the elven forge-city of Eregion to the political maneuvering of the dwarven kingdom of Khazad-dûm.
Morfydd Clark stars as a younger Galadriel, with Charlie Vickers playing Sauron in his various disguised forms, including the human smith Halbrand. Robert Aramayo plays Elrond, Charles Edwards plays the master smith Celebrimbor, and Owain Arthur plays Prince Durin IV of the dwarves. The series is high fantasy in the most literal sense, adapted from Tolkien’s appendices and other writings rather than “The Lord of the Rings” itself, which gives the show room to build out corners of Middle-earth that were previously left mostly unexplored on screen.
J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay serve as showrunners, with directors including J.A. Bayona and Charlotte Brändström working across the series. It streams on Prime Video, with Season 1 released in 2022, Season 2 in 2024, and a third season currently in development as the show works toward its planned five-season arc covering the entirety of the Second Age. The series carries one of the largest budgets in television history, and while critical reception has been mixed compared to some of the other shows on this list, its visual scale — sweeping vistas, detailed practical sets and effects work built to match Peter Jackson’s original film trilogy — remains genuinely impressive on a episode-by-episode basis.
Why These Shows Deserve a Spot on Your Watchlist
What separates a good fantasy show from a forgettable one usually isn’t the size of its budget or the scope of its world-building — it’s whether the story earns the emotional stakes it’s asking viewers to care about. That’s true whether you’re watching Dunk stumble through a jousting tournament with more heart than skill, or Louis and Lestat tearing each other apart across multiple decades and continents. Each of these eight shows takes a different approach to that same basic challenge, and each one largely succeeds on its own terms.
It’s also worth noting how differently these shows have fared commercially and critically compared to “House of the Dragon,” despite working with comparable source material pedigree, similarly stacked casts, and, in some cases, even larger budgets. “The Rings of Power” and “The Witcher” have both faced their share of criticism over pacing and character changes from their source material, while smaller-scale shows like “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms” and “His Dark Materials” have often been more consistently praised for staying tightly focused on character over spectacle. That range is part of what makes fantasy television, as a genre, worth exploring beyond any single flagship series.
The Bottom Line
Between hedge knights, vampires, monster hunters, elemental benders, demigods, daemons, Grisha and elves, there’s enough fantasy programming across these eight shows to fill months of watch time without ever touching Westeros again. Some, like “His Dark Materials,” offer a complete story from beginning to end with no cliffhanger left dangling. Others, like “The Witcher” and “The Rings of Power,” are still building toward their conclusions. And at least one, “Shadow and Bone,” is worth watching precisely because its story was cut short — proof that even an unfinished fantasy show can still be worth the time you put into it.
Whichever direction you go, all eight prove the same basic point: “House of the Dragon” might be the biggest fantasy show on television right now, but it’s far from the only one worth your attention.
