With House of the Dragon on the air and The Rings of Power around the corner, there’s a lot of fantasy TV to enjoy right now. But don’t forget about His Dark Materials, HBO’s adaptation of Philip Pullman’s beloved novel trilogy. The show is two seasons deep into a three-season run, and we’re finally hearing a bit about what’s coming.
The third and final season will adapt the third book in Pullman’s trilogy, The Amber Spyglass. But if producer Jane Tranter had her way, the show would have lasted much longer. “Honestly, I would have told it across nine seasons if I could have done,” she said at this year’s Edinburgh International TV Festival, per Radio Times. “There are so many stories that we weren’t able to do.”
"When Ruta Skadi meets the angels in season 2, it’s kind of like ‘Oh look, there’s some angels, I’m gonna go off now.’ In the book there’s this amazing sequence [with those characters] and there just isn’t time to do it."
I appreciate the ambition, although honestly, one of my biggest problems with His Dark Materials — and I say this as someone who has read the books more than once — is how thinly it stretched out the material. Especially in that first season, they couldn’t move slow enough.
His Dark Materials season 3 is coming (but we still don’t have a release date)
“I would have slowed [His Dark Materials] down even more,” Tranter continued, giving me a stress headache. “But unfortunately that’s probably the wrong thing for an audience – some would have liked it, but it’s expensive and it’s a season-a-book and that’s that and now it’s finishing.”
I think one book per season sounds about right for this series. And happily, The Amber Spyglass is the biggest book of the three and should fit more comfortably within the confines of a TV season than the first two did.
We still don’t know when the third season of His Dark Materials is going to premiere, but it should hopefully be later this year.
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