Why an Elder Scrolls television series won’t work

Word is that Netflix is adapting Bethesda’s hugely popular Elder Scrolls series, intending to make it as big as The Witcher. But that could be tricky.

We’ve gotten a lot of news lately about high-profile video game series being adapted for the screen, from Halo on Showtime to Fallout on Amazon to The Last of Us on HBO to Metal Gear Solid at the movies. And now, there are rumors of another. According to industry insider Daniel Ritchman, Netflix may be working on a TV version of Elder Scrolls, the iconic fantasy series from Bethesda.

Nothing is official yet, but we wouldn’t be surprised if developer Bethesda, which makes both Fallout and Elder Scrolls, didn’t want to stop at just one of its iconic series getting the small screen treatment. And The Elder Scrolls is one of the most popular RPG franchises of all time, so it would have a build-in audience. Through games like Morrowind, Oblivion and Skyrim, the studio has established the kind of extensive fantasy universe that could be perfect as a basis for a TV show.

On the other hand, there are reasons to be wary. Ritchtman reports that Netflix wants its Elder Scrolls to be just as or more popular than The Witcher, which is set in a world that was already well-known thanks CD Projekt Red’s hugely successful Witcher video games.

However, it’s much more difficult to adapt a series like The Elder Scrolls than it was to adapt The Witcher, because while CD Projekt Red put that series on the map in the United States, the show is actually based on Polish author Andrzej Sapkowski’s Witcher novels, which were around long before the games. Although adapting The Elder Scrolls would mean an established fanbase, history, lore, settings and characters, it’s hard to compete with the rich dialogue and development of a full-fledged book series.

HBO may have a similar problem on its hands with House of the Dragon, its follow-up to Game of Thrones. While the original series was based on George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire novels, House of the Dragon will be based on his Fire & Blood, which reads more like a history book than a novel. Any Elder Scrolls series will have the history and lore to back it up, but there won’t be a story that’s already been thought through for the writers to adapt in a straight-forward way. Most of the writing will be original, which could go either way. Yes, there are storylines from the games that would be fun to tell onscreen, but most of that material is fragmented across different lands and time periods.

Of course, any writing team could still make this work. Perhaps an Elder Scrolls series would focus more on individual, episodic stories rather than one continuing, epic storyline, as has become the style post-Game of Thrones. Or maybe they’d be better as movies.

And there are two novels based on Elder Scrolls lore, set during the aftermath of Bethesda’s fourth game in the series, Oblivion. The books, The Infernal City and Lord of Souls by Greg Keys, explore a period four decades after the Oblivion Crisis. The story shows us what happens on the continent of Tamriel when it falls under threat by an ancient and all-consuming evil known as Umbriel, a floating city that casts a terrifying shadow. Maybe that could form a good base for a show, and the writers could take it from there.

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h/t Gamerant