We value Owen Harris for keeping relationships convincing when genre television turns dark. His handling of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms gives us reason to follow him, though its uneven humour sets a limit on our enthusiasm.
Fi1m perspective
In A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms (2026), Peter Claffey and Dexter Sol Ansell remain good company even as the mood darkens. Owen Harris and fellow director Sarah Adina Smith keep their central relationship convincing, without pretending that decency means nothing unpleasant can happen. We warmed to the friendship because the two performances held our attention even when the story stretched thin. That is a useful indication of what Harris does well: he lets us stay interested in people through a change of tone. It makes him a director worth following, with reservations.
His television work includes Misfits (2010), followed by Black Mirror: Be Right Back (2013) and Black Mirror: San Junipero (2016). The feature debut, Kill Your Friends (2015), took him into black comedy and music-industry satire, but series have remained the larger part of his directing work. His work on Charlie Brooker's Black Mirror belongs to a recurring interest in stories that mix drama with speculative ideas. Later, Mrs. Davis (2023) gave him several episodes over which to establish and sustain a tone. These are assignments that need a director to judge how far the mood can shift without losing us.
On Mrs. Davis, cinematographer Joe Anderson was a collaborator, and Harris's work included establishing the visual approach through camera and lens choices. That matters when a programme asks drama, humour and speculative elements to share the same episode: the director has to make those changes feel plausible. His action work on A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms likewise keeps attention on the people caught in the fighting. It is a sensible priority for a programme whose chief pleasure is the company of its leads.
The limits are also clear in A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms: its humour can be needlessly coarse, and the story sometimes has too little to fill the time. Not every problem in a series belongs to its directors, but their work cannot be judged entirely apart from it. Some of the early pleasure diminishes as the programme grows darker, despite the care Harris and Smith take with the relationship. We would not ask them to remove the unpleasantness; testing those characters' decency is part of the point. Start here if fantasy appeals, provided toilet humour is not a disqualification.
Biography
Owen Harris is a British television and film director and producer, born in 1972 in London. He has directed episodes of series including Secret Diary of a Call Girl (2010), Misfits (2010), Black Mirror (2013–2019) and Mrs. Davis (2023), as well as the television films Holy Flying Circus (2011) and The Gamechangers (2015).
Harris made his feature film debut with Kill Your Friends (2015). He has also directed episodes of Troy: Fall of a City (2018), The Twilight Zone (2019) and Brave New World (2020), on which he served as executive producer. He directed three episodes of the first season of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms (2026) and acted as an executive producer on the series.
