The Winter King producers explain why they changed the books so much

The Winter King is a new show on MGM+ that’s based on The Warlord Chronicles novels by Bernard Cornwell. Cornwell also wrote The Saxon Stories, which Netflix adapted as The Last Kingdom. He wrote the Sharpe series about the Napoleonic Wars, which was adapted as a TV show starring Sean Bean. This guy knows historical fiction, so any TV adaptation can’t go wrong by sticking to the source material.

And The Winter King…kind of does that? Occasionally? The show changes a lot about Cornwell’s books, to the point where I — speaking as someone who read and loved The Warlord Chronicles pretty early in life — wondered why they bothered adapting them at all if they were going to change this much.

So this is a story about King Arthur, but one of the unique things about Cornwell’s books is that they’re told from the perspective of a character named Derfel, a solider in King Arthur’s ranks. This gives them a different flavor compared to your average Arthur story, of which there are many. In fact, Arthur doesn’t show up until partway through the first book, titled The Winter King. Merlin, another huge figure from the Arthurian legend, stays offscreen until even later.

But The Winter King show puts both of these characters front and center in a way I thought made the show much less interesting and unique. Why did it make these choices? Executive producers Julie Gardner and Lachlan MacKinnon talked to CinemaBlend about it.

The Winter King book has a “really fresh” take on King Arthur…so the show changed it

“I think there always [are challenges] regardless of what the project is, because what works on the page so beautifully doesn’t always work on the screen,” MacKinnon said. “One of the points… is in the novel itself, it’s told from the point of view of Derfel. It’s his voice that we’re discovering Arthur through, which I think is a huge strength in a way because it feels fresh because of that, because you’re seeing Arthur through Derfel and also Nimue later on in the novel. So it’s something that’s really fresh. But there’s two main challenges that that presents to us as the filmmakers, which is that when it’s a series ultimately about King Arthur, you want to see King Arthur, and you don’t want to wait for him until Episode 8.”

"That was something that we felt really had to bring forward. Because, you know, whenever you speak to a broadcaster, everyone wants to know about Arthur. Then the other aspect was to do with the voiceover itself, because in some ways, by hearing the voiceover from Derfel, who’s the old man, you know that he survived. And I think that takes a lot of the jeopardy away from, will he survive this moment? Or will he not?"

MacKinnon is referring to a framing story in the books; periodically, we’ll cut back to Derfel as an old man telling this story to another character. I don’t so much mind them cutting that bit, but I call bullsh*t on the claim that we “don’t want to wait for [Arthur] until Episode 8.” Arthur doesn’t show up for a minute in the books, but he still comes in well before the halfway mark. They could have introduced him at the end of Episode 2 and it would have been fine. Building up the character before we see him creates a sense of mystery and grandeur. I think the show gave that up.

Why did The Winter King change Bernard Cornwell’s books?

Gardner, meanwhile, claimed that Cornwell’s books remained “the North Star” during the writing process, but that things had to “open up” for TV. “The best example I can give is in bringing Arthur earlier in the series, compared to the novels,” she said. “There was a line in Bernard’s novels, which is something like, ‘A ruler is frightened of their male bastards, but loves their female bastards.’ And we knew we needed to do a backstory for Arthur to introduce him early in Episode 1. That whole banishment, that whole conflict with Uther came from that line of oh, he’s a threat or he doesn’t fit in.”

"And then across the series, it became very clear. This is an undercurrent in the novels, it became very clear that being a bastard was a negative, but also a huge positive for Arthur because he sees the world differently, he thinks differently. He’s got a greater independence, which makes him surprising in his kind of maneuvers. So yes, even when you’re changing something, what you’re trying to do is hold to the core of the novel, the spirit of the novel."

I don’t buy this either. And neither of them address why they fronted Merlin so often and so early, which I think is hurting the show the most. In the book, Merlin is a chaotic, memorable figure who makes a grand entrance, but the show takes all the air out of his character, turning him into a standard-issue mentor.

My suspicion is that the key to the changes lies in this line from MacKinnon: “[W]henever you speak to a broadcaster, everyone wants to know about Arthur.” My guess is that when they pitched this show to MGM+ and explained what made the books cool and different, some executive said, “What do you mean we don’t meet Arthur until later in the series? No one will watch if King Arthur isn’t the main character.” And then this slop was born.

The Winter King drops new episodes every Sunday on MGM+. Hopefully you’re less bitter about it than I am.

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