Game of Thrones showrunners reveal their first Netflix project

Last year, Game of Thrones showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss signed a $200 million development deal with Netflix, and everyone waited to see how they would follow up the most influential show of the decade.

After making a quiet Netflix debut as the directors of a Leslie Jones comedy special, Collider brings us news about their first big project: the pair will join actor Amanda Peet — Benioff’s wife — and Bernie Caulfield — who was a major producer on Thrones — as executive producers on The Chair, a six-episode dramady about the chair of an English department at a major university. Killing Eve star Sandra Oh plays the Chair, and Jay Duplass will also star. And that’s about all we know.

The idea for The Chair actually comes from Peet, who cowrote the pilot with Annie Julia Wyman and will serve as showrunner. It’s not clear if it’s supposed to be a one-off series or it could be renewed. Apparently, Benioff and Weiss pitched the idea to HBO years back, but the network passed. Now, here it is.

BEVERLY HILLS, CALIFORNIA – SEPTEMBER 21: Sandra Oh attends the BAFTA Los Angeles + BBC America TV Tea Party 2019 at The Beverly Hilton Hotel on September 21, 2019 in Beverly Hills, California. (Photo by Emma McIntyre/BAFTA LA/Getty Images for BAFTA LA)

Obviously, it’s a far cry from Westeros, with no dragons or ice zombies or swordplay in sight…that we know of. That by itself isn’t surprising; working on Game of Thrones for a decade straight was intense, and it makes sense they’d want to switch milieus, possibly to something that involves less horse wrangling.

With Peet taking on the lion’s share of the credits, I wonder if The Chair will mostly be her baby, while Benioff and Weiss work on something else. They’ve taken a couple of steps towards another “big” project since Game of Thrones, but so far nothing’s panned out. There was Confederate, their infamously derided would-be HBO show about an alternate universe where the Civil War was fought to a standstill and slavery still existed — HBO quietly killed that one just over a month back. At one time they were also attached to direct a new trilogy of Star Wars movies, but that was before the controversy of The Last Jedi and The Rise of Skywalker inspired Disney to completely rethink what it was doing with Star Wars. Enter Netflix and here we are.

Or maybe Benioff and Weiss want to focus on smaller-scale projects, which is also a completely valid path to take. We’re not sure when The Chair is coming out, but expect a shorter turnaround time than, say, the final season of Game of Thrones; it’s remarkable the time you can save when you don’t have to render a dragon destroying a city…again, we assume.

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