It's Daemon Time

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Once Game of Thrones ends this weekend HBO has a couple of big nerdy projects down the pike that might possibly fill that nerdy void -- one would be their Watchmen series, and the other is their team-up with the BBC trying to do a right proper adaptation of Phillip Pullman's glorious His Dark Materials books. That "right proper adaptation" dig was clearly aimed at the 2007 film, which took a point perfect cast and threw them into a mess of an unfocused thing that obliterated the most fundamental aspect at the heart of the series -- its bone-deep atheism -- because that is of course deemed impossible in this dumb country called America. Well now the UK has taken their shit back from the dumb Americans and made it their own, and we're just borrowing it from them, so ha, hopefully Mr. Pullman's getting the last laugh.

The cast for this re-do is very good -- James McAvoy's a fine choice for Lord Asriel, and even though Nicole Kidman was the platonic ideal of the "Mrs. Coulter" character I can't wait to see what Ruth Wilson does with her; I just saw Wilson on stage beside Glenda Jackson in King Lear this past weekend and she not only held her own, she might have, gasp, been the best thing on stage? 

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Well I can check “full on sobbed watching Shakespeare be performed“ off my bucket list now thanks to Glenda & Ruth Wilson

— Jason Adams (@JAMNPP) May 11, 2019

Anyway this is the second trailer I've posted for the series -- see the first one, from the BBC, right here -- even though as far as I can tell we still haven't got any sort of release date for it either in the UK or here in the US yet. But you'll hear from me the minute we do! Until then here, watch, luxuriate, it looks like they might have gotten it right, you guys:

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Oh and in case you haven't read Pullman's books I highly recommend them, and he's actually started an entire new trilogy (which overlaps with the original in terribly interesting ways) recently -- the first part of The Book of Dust series came out in 2017 and it's already got me riveted to where he's taking everything. The second book called The Secret Commonwealth is coming in October! ETA and I just now read this at io9 -- the BBC has already renewed the series for another eight episodes! I don't know what that means about what this first series contains, book to screen wise -- if it's one season per book, or what -- but the more the better. There's enough material here to last as long as Game of Thrones, at least.
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