The Kingkiller Chronicle TV show is set a generation before The Name of the Wind

There are a lot of splashy fantasy shows waiting in the wings to fill the void Game of Thrones will inevitably leave when it goes off the air later this year. You’ve got Amazon’s Lord of the Rings prequel, Netflix’s The Witcher series, Disney’s live-action Star Wars show, etc.

Not to be left out, Showtime has been readying a show based on Patrick Rothfuss’ Kingkiller Chronicles, a sprawling fantasy trilogy with a third and final book still on the way. “Showtime did finally greenlight the writers’ room,” Rothfuss told ScienceFiction.com. “It’s really amazing and I love working with [showrunner] John Rogers because he’s a deep, deep geek and he really loves these books and he really knows how to make TV. He’s put together an amazing writing room.”

Rogers, by the way, is the guy behind The Librarians, a fun action-adventure show on TNT. The Kingkiller Chronicle, about a magical prodigy named Kvothe on a quest to find the shadowy figures who killed his musician parents when he was a child, is heavier, but I’m glad to see the show is coming together. The books are richly imagined, and the fantasy world of Temerant has enough colorful corners to help it stand out from, say, Westeros or Middle-earth. And Rothfuss himself is involved in the production, as George R.R. Martin was for the first few season of Game of Thrones. “It was really amazing and I’m so, so pleased with how the TV show is developing,” Rothfuss said.

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But not so fast, as Rothfuss has revealed the show will not actually follow Kvothe’s story, but will instead be set “a generation before the events of The Name of the Wind,” the first book in the series. “John pitched this show and the reason I loved it is because we sat down and as he was about to pitch it, he said, ‘I know you and we’ve talked. There is so much going on in this world that you never see in The Name of the Wind, right?’ And I said, ‘Oh, yeah.’ And he’s like, ‘You’ve got whole countries, and all the religion and the myth and the secrets and the currencies and what monsters are in the woods in these other parts of the world. Like Modeg here, you’ve got all that figured out, right?’ And I said, ‘Oh yeah.’ And he said, ‘Does Kvothe ever go there?’ And I said, ‘No, no he doesn’t. Not in the trilogy.’”

"So, he said, ‘I want to have a TV show with traveling performers that’s set a generation before and we see the world a generation before the events in The Name of the Wind and we get to explore this world in a way that a movie never can. And we get to meet characters earlier on before Kvothe existed. Some of these older characters, we get to meet them. We’ll get to explore parts of the world that we’d never get to see otherwise. And we also get a lot of narrative freedom because we don’t have to worry about impinging on areas in the book or the movie.’ It was the smartest pitch I had ever heard and everyone jumped on it."

If you were looking forward to seeing Kvothe’s story play out on TV, this might be a bit of a bummer. But keep in mind that Lionsgate is also making a series of Kingkiller movies, and I imagine those will adapt the actual books. For both the movies and the TV show, Rothfuss is executive producing alongside Lin-Manuel Miranda, who will be writing the music. Anyone who’s read The Name of the Wind knows that music plays a big part in the story, so you could do worse than the guy who wrote Hamilton.

As for when the final book in the series — The Doors of Stone — will come out, Rothfuss said nothing. (The last book hit shelves in 2011, which might ring a bell for Song of Ice and Fire fans who have been waiting seven years for The Winds of Winter.) Rothfuss does intend to keep writing in this world for a while, though, even after his series is over. “I don’t have a plan of writing X number of books, but there are stories that I want to tell,” he said. “I actually have one book that I sort of started, then stopped and it is set in Modeg. It’s the story of Laniel Young-Again. I would very much like to finish that book. There’s other little stories and vignettes and novellas…there’s a ton of stuff. I’m working on a comic with my friend Nate Taylor to do an illustrated version of the full story of The Boy That Loved the Moon. That’s nice because I’ve already written that and now Nate is just charging forward boldly and just blazing a trail with the art.”

“So yeah, more stories in Temerant. I specifically made that world big enough so I can play in it for a long time.”

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