Here’s what would’ve happened on Amazon’s cancelled Dark Tower show

At one point, Amazon was adapting three wildly expensive fantasy series at the same time: a show set in Middle-earth, based on material from J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings; a show based on Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time series; and a show based on Stephen King’s The Dark Tower books. The Wheel of Time show is well into filming, we haven’t heard much about The Lord of the Rings show recently, and Amazon opted not to go forward with The Dark Tower.

That one was always gonna be tricky. King’s eight-book epic is very ambitious, a horror-adventure-fantasy-sci-fi mashup with a western motif. It followed Roland Deschain, from the city of Gilead. Roland is a member of a knightly order of gunslingers sworn to uphold peace in a world plagued by war. He seeks the Dark Tower, which connects all dimensions.

At one point, Stephen King is a character in the books; it’s a weird series that would have been hard to get right. Just ask the universally loathed 2017 movie. But one-time The Walking Dead showrunner Glen Mazzara, who was running the series before Amazon passed on it, at least sounds like he had an idea of where to go with it. Appearing on a recent episode of The Kingcast podcast, he laid out what we missed when Amazon took passed on the show.

To start, Mazzara’s show would have started with the fourth book in King’s series, Wizard and Glass, which is a prequel that tells us about Roland’s younger days. Drawing on flashbacks from The Gunslinger, the first novel in the series, and the side-quel The Wind Through the Keyhole, that section of the show would have lasted into the third season. Said Mazzara:

"I thought if we have a character that loses everything — he loses his mom, he loses his dad, he loses the love of his life, he loses his ka-tet, he loses his land, his kingdom. He just loses the entire world, and he feels responsible for it. And then when he’s stumbling through that desert — to me, that was going to be episode 304 — we’ve seen him lose everybody in the Battle of Jericho Hill. Then all of a sudden the audience is invested. The audience has gone through the process. The audience has lost all of that, and now the audience understands exactly who Roland is when he meets the adult ka-tet and he goes on his journey."

In this part of the show, we would have gotten to see Gilead fall, seen Roland lose his childhood friends at the Battle of Jericho Hill, watched his relationship with Susan Delgado blossom, and seen him develop a hatred for the sorcerer Marten Broadcloak, who seduced Roland’s mother and worked to bring down Gilead from within. The opening scene would have Roland chasing Marten — an uber-villain in the King mythos who goes by many names — through the desert, which the most iconic scene from the series.

"The story of the pilot is basically Roland in the desert. ‘The man in black fled across the desert and the gunslinger followed.’ In this version he’s chasing Marten because Marten was with [Roland’s mother Gabrielle Deschain] and he’s vowed his revenge. In the books, [Roland] gets his guns to kill Marten and then Marten sort of disappears from the narrative. So [Roland] chases Marten across the desert and ended up in Hambry. He meets Susan. In the pilot it’s the Feast of the Kissing Moon and she’s being presented to the mayor and she meets Roland on the road. Roland goes into Traveler’s Rest."

And things would take off from there. Clearly, Mazzara had solid ideas about what to do with the series — he even had plans for that Stephen King self-insert, hoping to get the author to play himself. He knew what he wanted to do with several side characters, as well:

"I was really looking forward to Blaine [the demented monorail train from The Waste Lands]. I had ideas for that. I was really looking forward to [Father Callahan]. In fact, I was hoping to take Callahan’s backstory from the time that he leaves ‘Salem’s Lot to the time he ends up in Mid-World, I wanted to do that as its own mini-series. I didn’t think you could fit that into The Dark Tower proper, so I wanted to split that off. I had plans to hire the best joke writers in Hollywood to write when Roland and Susannah meet Dandelo. I really wanted that to be laugh out loud funny. There were all these things I was jonesing to do."

Mazzara is shopping the pilot around to other networks, so it’s possible he could get to do some of this stuff. “I think there is interest…I think it’s just a matter of the timing. It’s an expensive show. It’s a sprawling show. You have to really do it right. You have to have a team of people who really commit to knowing this material. And I think the audience would have to be patient.”

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h/t Syfy Wire