Later this year, the late Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman‘s Good Omens will premiere on Amazon and BBC, with Gaiman as showrunner. But it won’t be the only Pratchett book heading to BBC in the near future. A live-action Discworld series is currently in development, and BBC is said to be looking for an outside partner to help bring it to life.
Deadline broke the story about the six-part Discworld adaptation, which is currently being called The Watch. Strike Back and The Musketeers writer Simon Allen is handling the script, and the series will be co-produced by BBC and Narrativia, the production company founded by Pratchett. It’s likely that an American network or streaming service will also join this production.
Pratchett wrote his first Discworld novel in 1983, and he penned 40 additional books within the series before his death in 2015. That’s a lot of material to choose from, and it’s unclear which characters or settings that Allen will focus on. Although if we have a vote, we’d love to see the adventures of the hilariously untalented wizard, Rincewind, get a fresh adaptation. The British network Sky 1 adapted two of the Rincewind stories as a TV movie back in 2008.
It’s also worth noting that Pratchett’s Discworld series frequently parodied the works of other authors, like J. R. R. Tolkien and Robert E. Howard. So it’s more of a comedic fantasy than a standard tale. Even the description of the Discworld itself is somewhat ridiculous: a massive, planetary scale flat disc that is balanced upon four elephants that stand on the back of a giant turtle.
Which Discworld tales would you like to see in the potential TV series? Let us know in the comment section below!
Images:Random House/Penguin Press
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