What's the next Game of Thrones?

With Netflix adapting The Witcher, the cult series by Andrzej Sapkowski about supernatural monster-hunter Geralt of Rivia, and Amazon making big-budget plans for a new take on JRR Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, the years ahead are going to be dominated by a genre previously belittled, mocked or ignored.

“Game of Thrones didn’t just open the door to more fantasy commissions,” says US TV critic Maureen Ryan. “It opened the floodgates. I honestly believe that the two biggest things to happen to TV in the last decade were the runaway successes of Game of Thrones and The Walking Dead. It told TV executives not just to pursue fantasy books or comics – but to gobble them up.”

The gobbling shows no sign of stopping. In addition to Witcher, Netflix has signed a deal with CS Lewis’s estate for The Chronicles of Narnia, and is also adaptating Leigh Bardugo’s Grishaverse novels whose hero, in an inversion of the standard fantasy trope, is a heroine. Her coming-of-age journey is not as straightforward as it initially seems, though she does of course have two names: Alina Starkov and the somewhat grander Sun Summoner.

US channel Showtime is working with Lionsgate on both a film adaptation and a TV spinoff of Patrick Rothfuss’s acclaimed Kingkiller Chronicle, which also subverts fantasy tropes, showing the protagonist not as a shining hero but as a guilty and broken man. On board as producer is Lin-Manuel Miranda, creator of musical phenomenon Hamilton. Meanwhile, in one of the few original projects in development, Joss Whedon will return to TV with The Nevers, a slice of Victorian sci-fi to air on HBO.

We have HBO to thank for something that sounds genuinely groundbreaking: it has optioned Nnedi Okorafor’s Who Fears Death, which is set in a beautifully drawn post-apocalyptic Sudan and follows Onyesonwu, a child born of rape, on her quest for revenge against her sorcerer father. HBO, keen to keep the goose laying its golden eggs, will also begin filming Long Night, the Game of Thrones prequel, this summer, with Naomi Watts heading the cast and a script by Jane Goldman, co-writer of 2010’s glorious superhero riot Kick-Ass.

What's the next Game of Thrones? All the contenders for fantasy TV's crown

 

Personally, I would love to see Who Fears Death and also would love to see Children of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adeyemi and one of Marlon James books, made into a series. Game of Thrones was amazing however lets not forget they were very few people of colour on that show.