Upcoming 2022 TV shows - trying to be "the next Game of Thrones"

[Zorral]

Well, the USA YAY rank-and-file is appeciatively embracing the Mean and Cruel for their own sake with ever increasing ardor even unto performing blood sport personally whenever they believe the opportunity has presented itself.

[Darryk]

To find the next Game of Thrones you first have to find the next A Song of Ice and Fire. Anyone know of any?

I know Joe Abercrombie is considered close to GRRM quality, and I love his books, especially his dialogue and character development; but they're a lot more cynical about human nature than even ASOIF, and they don't have a potentially world-ending threat like the White Walkers to give the story that additional power and mystery.

[Werthead]

That's a reasonable point. ASoIaF was a success partially because it wasn't a typical fantasy story, and GoT for the same reason. The success of Shadow & Bone, The Witcher, Arcane and now WoT shows you can be a success with more traditional fantasy elements present and correct in higher amounts.

If you want a fantasy story that does a comparable thing of being low magic (until it isn't) and is very character-focused with an occasional big magic display or battle sequence, the obvious choice is The Farseer Trilogy, with the added bonus it is excellent. However, it's a much "smaller" and more claustrophobic story than most of the others mentioned, with a very tight focus on one protagonist. How long a mass audience will tune in to see the protagonist getting the living shit kicked out of him every single week for nine books/probably 6-7 seasons on end is also another question. The related series (Liveship Traders and Rain Wild Chronicles) are much more traditional fantasy and would require much higher budgets.

Bernard Cornwell's Warlord Chronicles could tap that ASoIaF vein of doing politics and wars and having different factions to support, whilst also being low (arguably no) magic with big battles, but still a strong character focus. It's quite short though. Bad Wolf have been working on an adaptation for some time and not cracked it yet.

Maybe Williams' Memory, Sorrow and Thorn, which inspired ASoIaF in the first place, could work in an adaptation, though I think the general audience's patience with "series that look a bit like Tolkien" might not endure long enough for it to have a chance.

[IFR]

@Annara Snow

Conduct yourself like an adult and I may engage with you further. I refuse to respond to someone who - and I can't believe I'm saying this - immediately throws a tantrum when someone else has the audacity to express a difference of opinion.

2 hours ago, Werthead said:

Bernard Cornwell's Warlord Chronicles could tap that ASoIaF vein of doing politics and wars and having different factions to support, whilst also being low (arguably no) magic with big battles, but still a strong character focus. It's quite short though. Bad Wolf have been working on an adaptation for some time and not cracked it yet

I would absolutely love to see the Warlord trilogy brought to screen. And the Farseer series. I don't know if Cornwell's material could achieve GoT kind of broad appeal, though. I rather like the adaption of The Last Kingdom, to list a somewhat similar Cornwell adaptation, but that doesn't seem to be hugely popular.

2 hours ago, Werthead said:

The success of Shadow & Bone, The Witcher, Arcane and now WoT shows you can be a success with more traditional fantasy elements present and correct in higher amounts

I'm curious if you have the metrics to indicate any of these shows have the same popularity as GoT? For a while, GoT was the most popular show in the world.

WoT is popular for an Amazon show (for now; considering how poorly it ended, I have to wonder about its audience retention for next season), and The Witcher is one of the more popular shows on Netflix, but is it one the top shows in the world?

Critically, of course, none of the shows come close to matching what GoT achieved. I have a very hard time thinking of The Witcher or WoT being nominated for a writing or directing award alongside a show like Succession, which is one of the current favorites of critics.

[Werthead]

39 minutes ago, IFR said:

 

I'm curious if you have the metrics to indicate any of these shows have the same popularity as GoT? For a while, GoT was the most popular show in the world.

They probably don't, they're just the fantasy shows we know of that have been successful by the metrics of the network/streamer involved and have been renewed for further seasons.

I'd also be careful with "the most popular show in the world." That was banded around a lot, but it ignored the fact that, for example, during its run it was outscored in the UK alone by, for example, Doctor Who, sometimes by as much as 12 times over (GoT aired on a very expensive satellite channel and Who on an effectively free-to-air channel), and in other countries GoT was likewise often buried by local competition. To get to the idea of it being the most popular drama series in the air, you had to extract every audience figure from every country and add them together, and also add on the massive number of illegal downloads, and HBO was probably reaching a bit to sometimes justify that comment.

Quote

WoT is popular for an Amazon show (for now; considering how poorly it ended, I have to wonder about its audience retention for next season), and The Witcher is one of the more popular shows on Netflix, but is it one the top shows in the world?

According to Netflix, around 70 to 80 million people worldwide watched the first season of The Witcher which is apparently comparable to the number of people who watched the final season of Game of Thrones.

Whether Netflix were using some weird, beneficial-to-them, "technically correct" way of working that out is still somewhat unclear. However, the fastest track to being "one of the top shows in the world" is by being "one of the more popular shows on Netflix." Netflix simply out-reaches every other broadcaster, channel and streamer on the planet, easily (technically Amazon has more subscribers in terms of people with access to Prime Video, but in terms of the people who actually do use Prime Video regularly, it's more like 1/3 to 1/2 Netflix's numbers).

Quote

Critically, of course, none of the shows come close to matching what GoT achieved. I have a very hard time thinking of The Witcher or WoT being nominated for a writing or directing award alongside a show like Succession, which is one of the current favorites of critics.

A couple of the episodes that GoT was nominated for an Emmy for writing were pretty awful (the Season 5 "bad pussy" episode immediately comes to mind), though the earlier ones were much better. What shows get nominated for an award and which do not is often down to politics as anything else.

The Wire - probably the greatest drama TV series ever made - was never even nominated for an Emmy in any category, which remains a highly embarrassing blot on the credibility of the awards body. In fact, I've seen people theorising that the critics ignoring The Wire later made them over-correct by looking at any HBO show in an overly-positive and generous light.

[Zorral]

The Last Kingdom is very popular on this board.  It's far and away my favorite series, because historical fiction/screen is my favorite by far, followed closely and equally by Rome, Polo and The Borgias. But that isn't true for rank and file viewers, though as a publishing genre it does very well. Though no genre does as well on the page or the screen as crime/mystery etc.

Sharon Penman's Eleanor of Aquitaine in her Plantagenet series would do very well. Cersei's a piker in comparison.

The War Lord series would be great on screen -- if they did it rightly as they have done Last Kingdom.

[Annara Snow]

14 hours ago, Darryk said:

To find the next Game of Thrones you first have to find the next A Song of Ice and Fire. Anyone know of any?

I know Joe Abercrombie is considered close to GRRM quality, and I love his books, especially his dialogue and character development; but they're a lot more cynical about human nature than even ASOIF, and they don't have a potentially world-ending threat like the White Walkers to give the story that additional power and mystery.

I don't think they want to find another show just like GoT - which would be a bad idea. They're looking for something that can be similar "pop culture phenomenon" - a combination of mainstream popularity across various audience groups,  geek appeal, critical recognition, and hype, the so-called "watercooler tallk". 

Maybe some of the executives of networks/streaming services actually think that they need a show as similar to GoT as possible to get that, I don't know. But if they do, they have it backwards. Shows that manage to do that usually seem like something new and different- and a lot of it it is due to the right timing. A decade earlier, Lost was a similar pop culture phenomenon, and that show was obviously different from GoT 

If another show becomes a similar phenomenon, it will more likely be something unexpected. But if they are smarter, they are simply looking for successful and popular shows, rather than chasing another big pop culture phenomenon. GoT has opened the door for more fantasy, and even historical dramas, which is a really good thing, same way as Twin Peaks and then The X-Files in the 1990s opened the door for quirkier TV content and for more SciFi and supernatural shows.

 

@IFR Are you for real? It's absolutely hilarious how it's always the most rude and childish people who come in, start throwing tantrums and attacking someone for their opinion- in this case, for my crime of not worshipping GoT - who then start projecting their own behaviour into the other person and acting high and mighty, since they are unable to have a civil conversation as they lack actual arguments. You are really itching to be blocked, aren't you? The Dragon Demands was right, I should have ignored you from the start.

[Ran]

Folks, stay polite.

The success of Outlander  and to a degree Shadow and Bone makes me wonder if the next big thing isn't going to be some sort of fantasy with a more explicitly romantic story. What that would be, I do not know. A part of me wonders if Kushiel's Dart could fly as a series, for reasons not dissimilar to what this writer considered back in 2015 in Salon magazine. Beautiful people, romance, intrigues, magic, mysteries, awesome swordsmen, femme fatales... 

 

 

[Werthead]

3 hours ago, Ran said:

Folks, stay polite.

The success of Outlander  and to a degree Shadow and Bone makes me wonder if the next big thing isn't going to be some sort of fantasy with a more explicitly romantic story. What that would be, I do not know. A part of me wonders if Kushiel's Dart could fly as a series, for reasons not dissimilar to what this writer considered back in 2015 in Salon magazine. Beautiful people, romance, intrigues, magic, mysteries, awesome swordsmen, femme fatales... 

The success of Bridgerton backs that up as well.

I've often thought that Kate Elliott's Crown of Stars series could do well. The relatively low-key magic (at the start) and the fact it does for the late Dark Ages/early medieval period when ASoIaF does for the late medieval period, plus both the romance storyline and the hateful anti-romance storyline would get other people involved. Plus it's gritty without being full-on grimdark, plus there's big battles and political/religious scheming.

[IFR]

4 hours ago, Ran said:

The success of Outlander  and to a degree Shadow and Bone makes me wonder if the next big thing isn't going to be some sort of fantasy with a more explicitly romantic story. What that would be, I do not know. A part of me wonders if Kushiel's Dart could fly as a series, for reasons not dissimilar to what this writer considered back in 2015 in Salon magazine. Beautiful people, romance, intrigues, magic, mysteries, awesome swordsmen, femme fatales... 

This is a book I haven't heard of. I'm personally not into romance (unless they are unique and highly dysfunctional, so it becomes less about the "love" of individuals and more about the dysfunction itself - Gone Girl and Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolf are examples of "romances" I like). But they do seem to have appeal.

YA series have had some success in movies, so maybe the purportedly more faithful Percy Jackson TV show will have some success.

But otherwise, the sentiment in this thread that it's difficult to predict this kind of thing is one I agree with. Before now, in terms strictly of popularity and not confining it to fantasy, there was The Walking Dead and Game of Thrones. Before that was what? ER, Sopranos, The West Wing, House, The Big Bang Theory, Friends, Seinfeld, Frazier, Cheers, MASH, and I'm sure there are other shows that I'm missing (I did a quick Google on successful shows before 2010s).

It used to the case that success would more likely be found in a comedy sitcom, but I think that no longer applies.

I thought the popularity of Squid Game (which I believe Netflix claims is their biggest show) came out of nowhere.

It's also a challenge to even compare shows now. We rely on internal data from streaming companies rather than a single levelized quantity from Nielson.

[HexMachina]

As always I would 100% be down for an adaptation of Robin Hobb's works. It works pretty well as something to take a chance on because although you have 3 trilogies in the main series, plus two side series of 3 and 4 books each, you could reasonably just adapt the first trilogy and call it quits if it didn't perform as expected.

Similarly, Liveships works well as a standalone series, though as Wert says would require a much bigger budget - ships, magical creatures, lots of different locations, I'd imagine a lot of prosthetics etc. for the Rain Wilders. The Farseer Trilogy I guess would be relatively easy to produce (fewer locations, smaller cast) until you get towards the end of the series, as Wert said it's fairly low magic and what magic there is wouldn't take a lot of work to show. I agree it might be pretty difficult to get a TV audience to tune in every week to watch the protagonist get put through the wringer. 

I also hope we do get the Warlord adaptation that's been in the works since forever. Its short, fast paced, and has (imo) mass appeal.

[Annara Snow]

13 hours ago, Werthead said:

They probably don't, they're just the fantasy shows we know of that have been successful by the metrics of the network/streamer involved and have been renewed for further seasons.

I'd also be careful with "the most popular show in the world." That was banded around a lot, but it ignored the fact that, for example, during its run it was outscored in the UK alone by, for example, Doctor Who, sometimes by as much as 12 times over (GoT aired on a very expensive satellite channel and Who on an effectively free-to-air channel), and in other countries GoT was likewise often buried by local competition. To get to the idea of it being the most popular drama series in the air, you had to extract every audience figure from every country and add them together, and also add on the massive number of illegal downloads, and HBO was probably reaching a bit to sometimes justify that comment.

According to Netflix, around 70 to 80 million people worldwide watched the first season of The Witcher which is apparently comparable to the number of people who watched the final season of Game of Thrones.

Whether Netflix were using some weird, beneficial-to-them, "technically correct" way of working that out is still somewhat unclear. However, the fastest track to being "one of the top shows in the world" is by being "one of the more popular shows on Netflix." Netflix simply out-reaches every other broadcaster, channel and streamer on the planet, easily (technically Amazon has more subscribers in terms of people with access to Prime Video, but in terms of the people who actually do use Prime Video regularly, it's more like 1/3 to 1/2 Netflix's numbers).

A couple of the episodes that GoT was nominated for an Emmy for writing were pretty awful (the Season 5 "bad pussy" episode immediately comes to mind), though the earlier ones were much better. What shows get nominated for an award and which do not is often down to politics as anything else.

The Wire - probably the greatest drama TV series ever made - was never even nominated for an Emmy in any category, which remains a highly embarrassing blot on the credibility of the awards body. In fact, I've seen people theorising that the critics ignoring The Wire later made them over-correct by looking at any HBO show in an overly-positive and generous light.

Not only is it clear that politics/studio lobbying for their flagship shows is a big part of Emmy voting, but there's a very noticeable tendency to lazily nominate the same shows and same people over and over, based on name recognition, regardless of any decline of quality of shows/actual performance in question - which makes you wonder whether Emmy voters have even seen the shows/episodes in question.

Some of the blatant examples have been some of the guest star nominations and even wins given for cameos that didn't even constitute a challenging or memorable role. Margo Martindale is great and she was amazing as Claudia on The Americans, but she won an Emmy for a season where she just showed up in one scene to have a cup of coffee and briefly talk to Frank Langella's character. This year, Don Cheadle himself expressed his puzzlement over being nominated for The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, for just showing up for a few minutes in a not particularly memorable scene (which is all the more jarring since there were multiple actors whose nomination would have made a lot more sense- Wyatt Russell may have been more suited for Supporting, and Daniel Bruhl could be either Guest or Supporting, but Carl Lumbly definitely deserved a Guest star nomination and it was obvious which episode and scene for, it pretty much looked like a shoe-in... assuming the voters actually watched the show or the submitted episodes).

[Whiskeyjack]

Re: The First Law

22 hours ago, Darryk said:

they don't have a potentially world-ending threat like the White Walkers to give the story that additional power and mystery.

Not sure I agree with that.  The entire background of Bayaz, Khalul, the Magi, the Demons, Euz, Juvens, Khalul, etc. is pretty epic.

I've always wondered why Abercrombie's books haven't been adapted.  Probably biased because its my favorite series, but feel like it's the best choice out there among fantasy properties.  Maybe something has happened behind the scenes and it hasn't gotten out to the rest of us or I've just missed it.  But feel like it has a ton of potential.

[Ran]

2 minutes ago, Whiskeyjack said:

I've always wondered why Abercrombie's books haven't been adapted. 

I recall two or three years ago someone photoed a studio writers' room somewhere in Culver City which very clearly had someone attempting to adapt the First Law books (they had reference photos for inspiration, and there was a white board with some notes that mentioned First Law characters and the like). Abercrombie even commented on it, saying he wasn't at liberty to say much, but it wasn't a movie (hence speculation it was a TV show).

 

[The Dragon Demands]

yeah

[The Dragon Demands]

I’d kind of like to see NK Jemisin’s Fifth Season books adapted, but I’m terrified that after what happened to Game of Thrones they’ll screw it up. Same with Kingkiller Chronicles.

that’s why I’m trying to focus on what they’re actually making right now 

[Whiskeyjack]

3 hours ago, Ran said:

I recall two or three years ago someone photoed a studio writers' room somewhere in Culver City which very clearly had someone attempting to adapt the First Law books (they had reference photos for inspiration, and there was a white board with some notes that mentioned First Law characters and the like). Abercrombie even commented on it, saying he wasn't at liberty to say much, but it wasn't a movie (hence speculation it was a TV show).

 

Interesting, thanks for the heads up.  On the one hand, that's good to hear.  But on the other hand, looks like it was back in early 2018, which is nearly 4 years ago now.  I don't know much about how long these things take, but that seems like a pretty long time.

[Ran]

9 minutes ago, Whiskeyjack said:

Interesting, thanks for the heads up.  On the one hand, that's good to hear.  But on the other hand, looks like it was back in early 2018, which is nearly 4 years ago now.  I don't know much about how long these things take, but that seems like a pretty long time.

Yeah, probably didn't go anywhere. Pretty much every noteworthy fantasy you can think of has been optioned at some point in its life, and the vast majority don't go anywhere. Like Kushiel's Dart is still under option and Carey recently remarked that they're still shopping it around but haven't found a person who can get attached to it who will get it greenlit. 

[Krishtotter]

On 12/24/2021 at 11:08 PM, The Dragon Demands said:

Lord of the Rings Second Age Prequel (September 2) has the potential to be good or a complete flop, we don't know. Don't assume it will be good (we're uneasy about behind the scenes staff things on it). But like Last Airbender...either way, people will be talking a lot about the first season, and if it's bad they'll only start ignoring it by season two.

Indeed it's very hard to say anything, even tentatively, about that particular show's prospects re quality right now - given the complete dearth of any official updates. 

Some of the rumoured leaks from behind-the-scenes have been rather perplexing to put it mildly, however - at least on paper - adapting The Akallabêth could be fodder for some compelling, if ultimately grim/depressing/elegaic, televisual drama.

FoF, the main source of credible information at the moment on the show, had this to say the other day:

"From what else we have heard, this show will be a perfect fantasy show and in that aspect will not fail - excellent TV. Of course without seeing any footage it’s hard to make a firm stance, but from the tidbits we have received especially from sources on set who know Tolkien, the show seems to have tidbits of lore scattered here and there such as when Pharazon name drops some old kings. But I think the good thing this show has compared to WoT and others is that in Numenor we will get the gritty Machiavellian court politics whereas on the other side you have halflings finding wizards from the sky and then the high fantasy aspect of the elven kingdoms. They can meddle and experiment with all those aspects towards the needs of the average viewer and for excellent television so in that aspect I do believe it will be a success."

[Zorral]

Translation -- "This is gonna really suck."