To me, the big issue is that in order for a series to fly, it would have to be either based wholly within the context of a given fantasy setting (Narnia, Middle Earth, Pern (shut up, geeks; they’d bill it as fantasy and you know it)) or in a fantasy setting that is invented completely anew for the series.
Making a series out of somebody else’s novels is iffy–think about Harry Potter. Makes for great movies, but what would it be like on HBO as a 26 episode per season series? It’s only taken 12 hours to urn through the first few books; they’d get one season out of it, tops. Most of the existing worlds that are available have too little in them to make a series. Same problem with Middle Earth.
Making a series out of a completely new world has two big problems: (a) the fanwankers really want series made out of their favorite worlds, and would endlessly nitpick and rag on the writing, and (b) you have to have a really good fantasy writer writing the stories. Any good fantasy writer is, you know, writing books set in their own worlds. We don’t yet have an entire corps of experienced hack writers to churn out a TV series. We have plenty of detective story writers, so we have lots of detective TV shows.
I disagree. The 12 hours have left out a ton of stuff, and having a series following Harry, Ron, and Hermione throughout their school days could be great. The books are long, and there’s a lot of stuff Rowling just hints at or gives a basic outline to.
Well, that’s my point, actually: somebody not Rowling would have to have license to fill all that out, and it would conflict with or compete with whatever Rowling is doing with the series. She’s not interested in writing for TV, and nobody else is interested in writing under her thumb, which is the same reason why it took so long to get a LOTR movie series: the Tolkien estate were very stingy with their approval of anybody without the Tolkien name writing it.
Think about it: it’s a huge, incredibly deep world; it was created by not one but several people and is constantly reworked by dozens of others; it doesn’t have any “defnintive” narratives or pivotal characters written by specific writers. You can do whatever you want with it… and many writers have. Besides, FR has appeared in pen-and-paper RPGs, computer games and novels. Why not add a TV series?
Those movies are going to be an albatross hanging from the neck of D&D for years to come. And, again: There are about nine thousand novels out there, and the fans are psychotically nitpicky about continuity and timeline. You think the LOTR fans were bad? Go check out the novel forms at the WOTC site. Yikes almighty. So, you’ve got all this stuff you could make a tv series out of, but every single scene you shoot is going to generate a firestorm of fury and indignation just as bad as PJ’s initial decision to have Arwen accompany the Fellowship. They would have to come up with an entirely new series, completely separate from anything else written, to avoid that. If they try to tie the series in with stuff that happened in the novels, suddenly we’re talking Enterprise all over again.
No, it really doesn’t. They have handwaving explainations of some of the more blatant inaccuracies - but that’s because they’re more than willing to put obvious inaccuracies in for the sake of the story, or a neat visual effect, or because they think it’d make a funny joke.
I’m pretty sure it could be done. A war story type situation. Castle A vs Castle B 40-50 miles apart. Spys patrols, sneaking about, planning of assaults, raids, all could make for plenty of low cgi storyline. Toss in a good guy in love with a girl in the bad guys town, to foce confrontations. Toss in a little historical bits like masters teaching new aapprentices how to make armor, weapons, weave, sew, cook, etc and make it as historically accurate as possible for stealth educational value. Might even want to try playing it from both sides in such a way that there is no clear good guy/bad guy line allowing fans to take up sides with their favorite actors. Finale could be a monster 2 part CGI heavy castle assault.
So don’t mention D&D in the marketing. Those who know will watch it anyway, and those who don’t will just think of it as fantasy.
Those few FR “novels” I’ve read have been utter crap (the trilogy where the gods all became mortals - made Dragonlance look like George R.R. Martin in comparison). It’s the world I love, not the novelizations. As far as I’m concerned not a single character from the novels should ever appear or be mentioned in the series*, just so long as it’s set in Faerun, and has our intrepid heroes and heroines travelling from Waterdeep to the Sea of Fallen Stars and back while fighting Thayans and Amnians, Zentharim and Drow, dark cultists and demons every step of the way. That would be very, very cool.
*OK, you can keep Elminster. He’s part of the scenery.
I thought you were saying that there wasn’t material there for a series. I think there is. Whether anyone could get permission to write it is an entirely different story.
The other problem with fantasy is that the audience can’t really know what to expect, what is and is not possible with that particular world’s magic. This isn’t so much a problem with SF: Due, I suspect, to the fact that SF extrapolates from known science, there’s a lot of established common ground to most SF settings. But with fantasy, anything goes.
Using a D&D based setting ought to be a good solution to this problem: There are rules on exactly what is possible, and by whom, and those rules are familiar to a lot of people (more so than any other RPG). The problem there would all be in the marketing: I think people can forget entirely about the D&D movies, but the game itself has a reputation as the passtime of dorks. Yes, those of us who are, in fact, gamer nerds don’t have any problem with this, but I fear that we’re not a large enough audience to support a TV show.
I think a GOOD Fantasy show could garner a sizeable audience. The success of BSG has made a lot of people rethink the genre bias.
Who would have thought a remake of a campy 70’s cult show would be a such a hit?
Plus, the demands are less for a network like SciFi or FX.
The problem of course IS money. Because it is a primitive setting, MOST of the shots have to be done on location and not in a studio. This shoots the budget through the roof before you ever get to the CGI lab.
Still, I hope we see it one day. Most Fantasy, TV or film, is campy junk. Thank goodness for Peter Jackson.
I’d love to see a studio put faith in a creator with a creative vision like Ron Moore to produce a top notch fantasy series with an ongoing plot.
Your premise could make a great show, but it doesn’t really sound like a high fantasy at all; more of a medieval period-piece drama. The OP is talking about a high fantasy in the sense of swords and sorcery, faeries and dragons, etc.
Basically, it doesn’t lend itself to an episodic format very easily, plus it can be very expensive. And before Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter changed all of it, it was mostly pretty crap.
Aside from the cost issue, the problem with doing “high fantasy” as a series (defining the genre as the mythical heroic saga type of thing, like Arthurian stories, Greek myth, Beowulf, LOTR when dealing with anyone except hobbits) is that over the course of a series you tend to become involved in the day-to-day lives of the main characters. High Fantasy needs to keep at least some of the characters as archetypes. They can’t become accessible people with petty flaws or it defeats the purpose of the genre. They can have a huge, heroic character flaw that will lead to their downfall, but not a lot of niggling little stuff like self-doubt, body issues, or shyness. High Fantasy is very stylized and once you take away that distance between Them and all us other mere mortals
Now plain old Sword & Sorcery stuff, that’s different. Heck, there’s got to be several seasons worth of Discworld material already, and if someone would do a good Conan instead of a generic wink-at-the-audience piece of dreck, I’d watch it.
I can see HF being successful as a TV series only if it uses characters that are modern. Like a Wrinkle in Time or The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe kind of thing, where the characters were normal people who end up in a fantasy world. An audience would care about those characters more than they would care about people they could not relate to. That is the only way I can think of that would hold an audiences interest for a long period of time; if they genuinely cared about what happens to the characters over a long run.
You can also add Sabrina the Teenage Witch to the list of crappy HF.