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

[Werthead]

You do need a creative attached to it with some clout. Benioff was a very hot Hollywood property in 2006-11, which is why GoT got made. Joseph Mallozzi has some good Hollywood rep which is why Brian McClellan's Powder Mage trilogy looks likely to get made, despite it being very low profile compared to most other series. The Dishonored rumours (although that's a game series) have had some weigh to them because Gennifer Hutchison (Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul) is a huge fan of the games.

Do it the other way around - having the rights but not a strong creative force attached - is rarer and usually results in nothing getting made: Joel Silver's company had The Lies of Locke Lamora for ages but Silver could never get a writer-director combo interested in actually helming the project. An exception is Lord of the Rings: The Second Age, where Amazon picked up the rights and reportedly her serious trouble getting people in Hollywood interested (a lot of people saw it as a poisoned chalice post-Hobbit trilogy), which is why they ended up with the total nonentities who are in charge of it, despite being massively out-qualified by every single other writer on their team.

Although it is worth mentioning that the First Law project did him some interest from Tim Miller (Deadpool) but it sounds sounds like he was going to be relatively hands-off on it, and his subsequent sort-of fall from grace (getting moved off Deadpool 2, Terminator: Dark Fate bombing) maybe hasn't helped him getting projects off the ground.

[Spockydog]

20 minutes ago, Werthead said:

You do need a creative attached to it with some clout. Benioff was a very hot Hollywood property in 2006-11...

Looking at his IMDB credits, the main question I have is, why? Why was he so hot? Nothing he did up until that point was particularly noteworthy. 

Anyway, as soon as he ran out of source material, we saw his actual quality. Guy is a hack. And thank the gods of good taste (and the fact he fucked up GOT so badly) for sparing us Confederate.

*shudders*

ETA: Yeah, The Kite Runner, but any credit from that is offset by his involvement in Troy. What a shit show that movie was. 

[Ran]

The 25th Hour is an amazing film based on his own novel and with a screenplay adapted by him (it's one of the best films of the 00's, IMO), and Troy was a hit film, and that led to prestige work like The Kite Runner and Brothers. The biggest dud he had, the Wolverine: Origins film, was by all accounts extremely heavily rewritten by other writers and very far from what he had done, so it's hard to blame him for it without knowing if his script would have made a better movie or not than what made it to the screen.

I think his own novel writing suggests he actually has perfectly good chops as a storyteller, but perhaps not in a fantasy/pre-modern historical vein, and really I think he and Weiss phoned in the last seasons, in part due to having overworked themselves so heavily. Had they had more writers to spread work around and had they been more focused on telling the best story instead of the one most convenient to them, things may well have ended up differently. 

[Darryk]

5 minutes ago, Ran said:

The 25th Hour is an amazing film based on his own novel and with a screenplay adapted by him (it's one of the best films of the 00's, IMO), and Troy was a hit film, and that led to prestige work like The Kite Runner and Brothers. The biggest dud he had, the Wolverine: Origins film, was by all accounts extremely heavily rewritten by other writers and very far from what he had done, so it's hard to blame him for it without knowing if his script would have made a better movie or not than what made it to the screen.

I think his own novel writing suggests he actually has perfectly good chops as a storyteller, but perhaps not in a fantasy/pre-modern historical vein, and really I think he and Weiss phoned in the last seasons, in part due to having overworked themselves so heavily. Had they had more writers to spread work around and had they been more focused on telling the best story instead of the one most convenient to them, things may well have ended up differently. 

There were some really strong scenes in GoT season 1 that were not from the book; purely D+D's creation. The problem is the acclaim they got for those scenes seemed to go to their heads, and they started making up story arcs that didnt need to be made because they were like "we don't need to follow the books, we are the true geniuses!"

That's what makes the last few seasons so infuriating really; it was laziness and arrogance, not lack of ability. Lack of ability is forgivable. 

 

[Werthead]

1 hour ago, Spockydog said:

Looking at his IMDB credits, the main question I have is, why? Why was he so hot? Nothing he did up until that point was particularly noteworthy. 

Anyway, as soon as he ran out of source material, we saw his actual quality. Guy is a hack. And thank the gods of good taste (and the fact he fucked up GOT so badly) for sparing us Confederate.

*shudders*

ETA: Yeah, The Kite Runner, but any credit from that is offset by his involvement in Troy. What a shit show that movie was. 

Benioff worked fast, produced better work in a tighter timeframe than most and reportedly was very happy to get studio feedback and work to make the studio happy (reportedly his willingness to rework the GoT pilot rather than making excuses for it was a key reason GoT Season 1 was greenlit) rather than bring an ego to the table, well, at least before the end of GoT. That's a rare combination in Hollywood. It's also why people like Kinsberg and Goyer get a lot of work despite not being great writers.

Quote

 

I think his own novel writing suggests he actually has perfectly good chops as a storyteller, but perhaps not in a fantasy/pre-modern historical vein

 

Yes, City of Thieves is serviceable and would have been better recast as a contemporary novel; as a historical novel set during the Siege of Leningrad, it's completely laughable and shows an appalling lack of basic research (not quite Boy in the Striped Pyjamas bad, but almost).

[IFR]

I'm honestly surprised at the trend on this thread to depict GoT as some pure disaster. It went off the rails at the end - one could blame the showrunners for lacking the ability to write an ending for Martin. I personally don't think anyone would have been up to the task. Even Martin doesn't seem to be, considering the book series is moribund. Maybe someone could still have done better at the end, but almost no one could have done as well at the beginning.

Further, this perplexing gaslighting that all the metrics which indicated GoT acclaim are irrelevant seems crazy to me. How can we say anything is a good series, independent of our own bubble? Breaking Bad is rated 9.5 on imdb, won several Emmys, and is often well regarded among critics. Are we saying that all of this is meaningless because it's not an inviolable system to gauge whether something is "good"? The Wire is rated nearly as high as Breaking Bad on imdb. It hasn't won Emmys, but it did receive a lot of critical acclaim during its life, judging by metacritic. Are these series no better than Riverdale, because acclaim is imperfect and therefore means nothing?

Taste is subjective, of course, but it's nice to have some reference independent of one's bubble to evaluate quality. Otherwise we can make the argument that Fifty Shades of Grey is just as good a romance as Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

GoT certainly wasn't a perfect series, but the first season was about as loyal an adaptation of a book as you're likely to find, and the book was excellent. There were more changes as the story went on, but it was still faithful up to season 4.

Season 1 of WoT and season 2 of The Witcher probably have changed more of the content of their respective books than season 6 of GoT.

Anyway, I don't want to turn the thread into a GoT vs other fantasy shows thread, but I do feel like I've entered the Twilight Zone here. It's fine to not like GoT, but to then proceed and call The Witcher, Wheel of Time, and Shadow and Bone, which all provide the same bland, unsophisticated, internally inconsistent and plot-contrived YA storytelling as good is a very striking position.

[Ran]

I mean, acclaim is indeed imperfect. What someone believes is good is not the same thing as what some other person thinks is good. The New York Times wrote off GoT in its early seasons while others praised it. Taste is subjective. Your taste. My taste. The taste of "the public". You can tell me there's this a wonderful series that won ten Emmys, I should check it out... and then you tell me it's The Big Bang Theory and I'm going to roll my eyes and change the subject. The awards can mean something, but they can't ever outweigh your own personal engagement with what's awarded.

[Werthead]

I'm trying to recall where anyone said that GoT was a "pure disaster". My viewpoint is that Seasons 1-4 were pretty great, Seasons 5 and 6 were okay with some great episodes and moments and some very poor ones, and Seasons 7-8 were dumb as hell, only enjoyable as empty spectacle, and the ending was very poorly set up. Having 4 great seasons and 2 solid ones is more than most shows ever get.

I do think GoT did make some mistakes and had some problems even early on that made not getting a good ending more likely, and as a TV watcher I don't think even GoT-at-its-best was fit to buff The Wire's shoes, although it was solid enough to fetch Breaking Bad a beer.

[IFR]

18 minutes ago, Ran said:

I mean, acclaim is indeed imperfect. What someone believes is good is not the same thing as what some other person thinks is good. The New York Times wrote off GoT in its early seasons while others praised it. Taste is subjective. Your taste. My taste. The taste of "the public". You can tell me there's this a wonderful series that won ten Emmys, I should check it out... and then you tell me it's The Big Bang Theory and I'm going to roll my eyes and change the subject. The awards can mean something, but they can't ever outweigh your own personal engagement with what's awarded.

I absolutely agree, wrt to personal engagement. The Americans has acclaim, but I tried watching it and personally found it boring. It's not for me. That doesn't make it a bad series. I don't feel offended that others like it, or think that it makes them dumb. On the contrary, I can appreciate that a wide audience with their own preferences have an interest in this show, and I can respect that.

In terms of personal engagement, I would say the same of Riverdale. If you like it, there is nothing wrong with that.

But people on this thread speak of "quality" outside of their own specific preferences, or speak of the audience itself, and it's at that point where I think it's worth using metrics outside one's bubble to substantiate a disagreeing assessment.

In fact, I entered this thread with the purpose of correcting the impression that liking GoT and not liking WoT was an indication of sexist stupidity, which I took issue to since *I'm* that audience. It was needlessly insulting.

I didn't expect such a correction to be so controversial.

@Werthead

I agree with you on The Wire. That's my favorite show of all time, and it's not even a contest.

[Zorral]

4 hours ago, IFR said:

the book was excellent.  [presumably ... you meant bookS  ?

Opinion on that varies ... just as much among readers as among the professional book commentariat.     They have good reasons too, equally as much as those readers and the commentariat members who may and / or do believe the books are works of sheer genius, doing and accomplishing what has never been accomplished in fiction of ANY KIND ever before.

[The Dragon Demands]

I don't know

[The Dragon Demands]

Getting back on topic, I despair for the adult animation genre. A lot of them are getting cut off at the knees for not matching "the template" of "the brand", which is mindless children's stuff that can be shown out of order. 

Critically acclaimed shows like The Owl House on Disney, which really advanced LGBT representation a lot. They got their final season's episode order drastically truncated. The head writer gave an interview a month or two ago explaining that while pushback against the LGBT stuff was "a" factor that was discussed with the network, the real issue was that the show has "story arcs" when they want episodic nonsense. Maybe things will change in the shift to the big streaming platforms, but right now it's...discouraging.

[Teng Ai Hui]

My guilty pleasure is watching mindless reality shows, and two of my favorites are starting new seasons next week -- Dirty Jobs and The Amazing Race.  Also, Joe Millionaire is being rebooted.  Then, Gordon Ramsay has a new show called Next Level Chef.

[SpaceChampion]

Shadow And Bone doesn't even start filming its second season until late next month, so it'll be late 2022 or even 2023 before it streams.

[JGP]

I think the gallery of rogues that comprises The Black Company could fit the bill. And the Taken?

whew 

Last I heard Eliza Dushku and her [or some other] company picked it up for production, but it hasn't gone anywhere in years.

[Ran]

Arcane and Castlevania show that adult animation can work just fine. I suspect the success of shows like that (and to some extent stuff like Love, Death, + Robots) are changing minds about what can be done, hence the rumor HBO is considering an animated Seasnake series. 

[Darryk]

15 hours ago, The Dragon Demands said:

For years, our biggest source of information on what it was like behind the scenes on Game of Thrones...was their own HBO-produced behind the scenes videos. These are promotional materials and not objective. Actually looking over the comments of some cast and crew, such as independent director Neil Marshall, and the *bizarre* things they openly admit to in Hibberd's interview book from last year, it seems that seasons 1 to 4 were as good as they were....in spite of them and not because of them. That the cast & crew around them were working twice as hard to make it work. 

Really? Where can I find out more about this?

Only quote I've seen from Neil Marshall is about the producer asking him to show more nudity, which suggested there were perverts among HBO's ranks but didn't reflect on D+D in any way, I think.

[Ran]

4 minutes ago, Darryk said:

 

Only quote I've seen from Neil Marshall is about the producer asking him to show more nudity, which suggested there were perverts among HBO's ranks but didn't reflect on D+D in any way, I think.

Yes. Pretty sure the person Marshall was referring to was Frank Doelger, given the exact quote about how this producer said the other producers were trying to make art. Doelger was the experienced hand HBO put in to shepherd D&D for the first few years.

 

[Darryk]

5 minutes ago, Ran said:

Yes. Pretty sure the person Marshall was referring to was Frank Doelger, given the exact quote about how this producer said the other producers were trying to make art. Doelger was the experienced hand HBO put in to shepherd D&D for the first few years.

 

Aaaaand he looks pretty much how I pictured him 

 

[jurble]

I think the "next Game of Thrones" in terms of absurd worldwide popularity - most pirated show, etc - is going to be House of the Dragon.  I don't think the ill-will generated by the last few seasons has overwritten the affection people have for the series overall. Moreover, the most ardent detractors of the show's final seasons - like Reddit's /r/freefolk - are exactly the sorta nerds that will tune into it the first day anyway.   So if the show is actually *good*, I think it's a slam-dunk.

 

And how will it not be good, with, you know, dragon-duels galore?   Unless we spend the entire season just setting up the Dance of the Dragons.  I guess they could take it slow and end the season with when that one prince flies to Storms' End and 

Spoiler

gets killed by his cousin.  I think that's the most dramatic opening moment of the Dance and maybe a good cliff-hangar to end the season on, if they wanted to?  I don't know if they've cast someone compelling as *googling...* Lucerys whom the audience would care about if he died.

Also, do we need spoilers for Fire & Blood stuff?