“A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms” is the “Undercover Boss” of our era

The longest-running fantasy on TV sunnily depicts the American commoner’s relationship with the ruling class, and vice versa. It also airs on CBS.

“Undercover Boss” premiered during the Great Recession, when the wage gap had yawned into a canyon. Layoffs and waves of foreclosures became the norm while the same financial institutions received government bailouts, ensuring their leadership maintained their bonuses. All told, it was a terrible look for this country’s corporate rulers. Enter this cheerful work of capitalist propaganda.

Over its 11 seasons, an assortment of C-suite lords and ladies have infiltrated the ranks of their lowest-rung laborers to appreciate how hard they grind for their bread. Alarmed at the realness of their struggle, they toss their smallfolk a cash bump, a modest promotion, or maybe, if they’re really lucky, a nicer place to urinate. Rarely if ever do these minimum wage safaris net lasting structural change at the companies featured on the show. But if a person is fortunate enough to be chosen by a producer to be shadowed by their boss, they might be rewarded with, say, a surgery they wouldn’t otherwise be able to afford.

The signature goofiness of “Undercover Boss” is the cheap disguises producers use to camouflage the executives. “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms” employs a similar ruse to place its wandering Targaryen prince, Egg (Dexter Sol Ansell), on his path to better living through getting to know the peasantry. His hidden identity is accidental, since Egg’s lush of an oldest brother, Prince Daeron (Henry Ashton), shaves his head, allegedly to camouflage his identity while they’re traveling. It’s just as likely that he did it for fun.

The Targaryens are notoriously cruel, but as Daeron ruefully mentions in the first season’s finale, “The Morrow,” they didn’t start out that way; their elders beat it into them. So when Egg, who is revealed to be Prince Aegon V Targaryen midway through the six-episode season, rejoins his royal family, their reunion isn’t happy. He notices the thin layer of silver fluff reappearing on his skull with resignation, then angry despair.

While he’s Egg, squire to the honorable hedge knight Ser Duncan the Tall (Peter Claffey), he’s treated with the care an older brother is expected to show his smaller sibling. Dunk never wakes Egg with a knife at his privates and threats of castration, as he claims his brother Aerion (Finn Bennett) took pleasure in doing. Then again, Egg’s royal command stops Aerion’s guards from torturing Ser Duncan after the hedge knight beats up the prince for breaking a fair maiden’s finger. Aerion would have disfigured Dunk for that insolence, if not killed him, and no supposedly true knight would have stopped him.

To HBO, this “Game of Thrones” spinoff is a bridge between its lucrative sword, sorcery and old magic high fantasies. To the audience, it’s a heartening buddy dramedy about two boys choosing to forge a brighter path and quickly realizing they make each other better people. But this adaptation of George R.R. Martin’s Dunk and Egg novellas also questions whether those who inherit rulership deserve that duty, reflecting their cravenness in shining gleam of its heroes’ virtue.

Dunk’s good, stout heart informs his determination to live up to the ancient chivalric oaths, which also makes him hopelessly naïve. But his headlong rush to defend Tanselle (Tanzyn Crawford), a beautiful Dornish puppeteer who was simply entertaining the townsfolk, demonstrates the type of rare mettle that moves Egg to run away with Dunk. None of the high-born men he knows would sully their steel in the name of protecting the innocent.

It helps that Ansell’s Egg is persuasively wise and quick-witted as well as adorable, traits that directors Sarah Adina Smith and Owen Harris capitalize on by coaxing out a performance that quietly establishes Egg’s sense of wonder and goodness. Initially, Dunk doesn’t know him to be anything other than an orphan in need of a purpose. Once Egg is unmasked, we come to understand why he’s so drawn to this enormous man whose gentle spirit permeates Claffey’s faultless performance.

(Steffan Hill/HBO) Peter Claffey in “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms”

The scene that best defines the story’s idealism happens long before Dunk gets clunked in the head or skewered by a lance. Near the start, when Dunk reluctantly accepts Egg as his squire, he sets the terms of their relationship in a dark field outside the town where the tournament that births their legend takes place.

“By rights I should beat you bloody and send you on your way,” says Dunk, “but you look as if you don’t eat much. And if you swear to do as you’re told, I’ll let you serve me for the tourney.”

Claffey delivers this line in a way that hints his mentor, Ser Arlan of Pennytree (Danny Webb), made him the same offer long ago, when he follows the hedge knight out of Flea Bottom, carrying nothing with him but a festering wound. But the enchanted grin spreading across Egg’s face reads as delighted, not desperate. Maybe it means the kid’s elated to know his deception is working. Or maybe he’s figured out this stranger won’t treat him like a Targaryen prince — which is to say, he will respect and protect him. When Duncan is honest about his lowly circumstances but vows to keep Egg clothed and fed, and not to beat him “except when he deserves it,” Egg’s smile only broadens.

Leveling the upstairs-downstairs division between master and servant, or boss and worker drone, is one of the oldest tropes in the Land of Make-Believe. Dunk and Egg’s camaraderie fits the same tradition, proposing scullery maids can become queens. It’s also implied in the show (and confirmed in the broader Westeros mythos Martin established in his books and novellas) that much later down the road, their adventures transform them into populist heroes.

Those who know the longer view of story also know that assuming the mantle of the people’s prince doesn’t end well. Power never completely cedes its place at the top of the heap, and it rarely shares its spoils with the serfs taxed to maintain it.

Even so, “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms”’ high-minded depiction of how leaders might serve the people instead of bleeding them dry suits the reigning vibe of the moment. With the major parties’ handwringing over the upcoming midterms growing more desperate, and the country’s leadership attacking its citizens and abandoning assurances to lower the cost of living, it’s easy to see why some are closely watching what is happening in cities that have elected true political outsiders.

New York’s Mayor Zohran Mamdani has pulled the nation’s gaze with pledges to govern in the best interest of average New Yorkers instead of catering to the hyper-wealthy donor class courted by the city’s past leaders. He’s the embodiment of everything the nativist right fears: foreign-born, but not from an acceptably white country; Muslim; and most terrifying of all, a democratic socialist.

Mamdani launched his campaign by pounding the pavement and speaking directly to New Yorkers to find out precisely what they needed to change. And he didn’t exactly come from nowhere; he’s the son of filmmaker Mira Nair and is open about having been raised in privilege. Still, his name didn’t get him elected. Mamdani won a groundswell of support by promising bold and reasonable policies based on what the people told him. Aiding his victory was his predecessor Eric Adams’ flagrant corruption and ineptitude.

(Steffan Hill/HBO) Sam Spruell and Peter Claffey in “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms”

Prizing honor and fairness in a broken world tops the list of lies politicians use to coax voters, their subjects, into electing them. And a lot of us have come to accept that their officials won’t work as hard for them as they will for the corporations purchasing the policies that best serve their interests. Decades of this have disillusioned the working and middle classes into expecting nothing can or will change, that it’s every man, woman and child for themselves. That’s why maudlin figments of benevolent billionaires succeed in selling the myth that with enough backbreaking work, we might score a penthouse view, too; look who’s in the White House.

But in a fictional place where dragons once roamed, it’s not beyond imagination to believe that a little prince who forgoes soft castle living to throw in with the peasants might learn how to be an empathetic noble.

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This season’s central action is a Trial of Seven, a brutal combat pitting teams of seven knights against each other. The sadistic Aerion calls for it, knowing he has the power to command the best knights’ loyal service, while Dunk is a nobody. The hedge knight has no choice but to accept; otherwise, he’d face a court trial in which he’d certainly be condemned to lose the hand and foot he used to beat Aerion to a pulp.

But Egg finds a few good fighters to back Dunk, including Baelor, Prince of Dragonstone (Bertie Carvel). Dunk wins the day not with superior swordsmanship but by reverting to the bare-knuckle brutishness that kept him alive in the slums. He and Egg also lose much of the realm since the much-loved Baelor dies defending the hedge knight.

In “The Morrow,” Egg’s father, Prince Maekar (Sam Spruell), shares Ser Duncan’s guilt over Baelor’s death; Maekar, who fought by Aerion’s side, delivered the blow that killed his brother. But he goes against character by recognizing this wasn’t Dunk’s fault, since his middle son’s violent arrogance led to the Trial.

Maekar offers Ser Duncan a place at their family seat of Summerhall so he can stay with Egg and finish his own training under an approved master-at-arms. But Dunk declines, offering to take Egg as his squire only if the boy keeps roaming with him. And the hedge knight is honest about what that means, telling Maekar that his youngest will sleep in stables, inns, or the halls of some low-level lord or landed knight — or, just as often, on the hard ground.

Maekar recoils at the thought of a child of royal birth subsisting on salted beef. Dunk points out that his other two coddled sons, failures both, never lacked comfort. “All the beef Aerion ever ate was taken rare and bloody,” he points out. But Maekar remains unmoved. So the season ends with Egg taking his future in his hands and running away with his sweet giant to the sun-soaked kingdom of Dorne and, one hopes, a brighter future for the realm.

All episodes of “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms” are streaming on HBO Max.