In the lead-up to Monday's launch, the hype for House of the Dragon had set the pop culture landscape ablaze like a giant flying lizard had swooped down from above and burped out a scorching breath of fire.
Before it'd even started the series had cast a huge dragon shaped shadow across the land, quite literally at the All Blacks vs Ireland game at Wellington's Sky Stadium last month when fire spewed from the roof top and a dragon's shadow soared over the pitch at halftime to a cacophony of roars and dropped jaws from the tens of thousands of assembled sports fans.
Everywhere you looked you either saw ads for the show or comment about the show. It often felt like there was nowhere to hide from its white hot touch. But, given its lineage this has felt warranted.
House of the Dragon which is on Sky's Soho channel and streaming on Neon, is the prequel to the global phenomenon that was Game of Thrones. This has turned out to be something of a mixed blessing and not the privileged slam dunk of mass approval that you'd expect to greet a series following up on one of the biggest television shows of the last decade.
On the positive side, without that show, we wouldn't have this show. Where it gets thorny however is that just like a power-crazed princess riding atop a mythical beast Game of Thrones burnt down all of its hard-earned goodwill and audience currency with its terrible final season. A less than auspicious ending to a series that for years had made a solid claim to enter the hallowed realm of the TV greats.