The appeal of leveraging a new TV show off the back of existing material is, from a commercial perspective, obvious. The industry has never been more cut-throat, with success depending on gaining big viewing figures almost immediately – fail to capture the public imagination early on and you’re dead in the water. So it makes a lot of sense to base your project on intellectual property that will have some automatic name recognition among the great unwashed and, if possible, a built-in fanbase.
The artistic merits of House of the Dragon and Rings of Power are furiously debated, but there’s no doubting there was a sound business case for getting those shows off the ground: audiences of millions who had become attached to Game of Thrones and the Lord of the Rings/The Hobbit films, ready to start salivating at the prospect of new content from their favourite fictional universes.
Eddie Redmayne in The Day of the Jackal, which has been renewed for a second season.Credit: Marcell Piti/Peacock via AP
This is why in the modern day the craze for shows that return to the well, based on previous stories but expanding beyond the source material – whether they be deemed sequels, prequels, reboots, remakes or reimaginings – shows no sign of abating. The Day of the Jackal, an updating of Frederick Forsyth’s novel, has just been renewed for a second season. Historical epic Shogun is in development for a second and a third, as has The Night Manager, the John le Carre adaptation, the first series of which won acclaim way back in 2016.
These are all shows that have gained popular and critical success by reimagining the source material, and with new seasons will now go even further, developing new storylines within their fictional universes. Program makers understandably feel they’re on solid ground with the practice, and the evidence for that keeps mounting. On the big screen as well, sequels flood the market, and the biggest non-sequel currently in cinemas is still a sequel, in a way: Wicked, the adaptation of the Broadway musical, which is itself an adaptation of Gregory Maguire’s novel, which is itself a perspective-shifting spin on The Wizard of Oz.
As far as pre-existing awareness goes, Wicked was always on a winner. It’s been 85 years since Judy Garland pranced down the yellow brick road – and well over a century since L. Frank Baum wrote the Oz books – but just about everyone still knows the story and recognises the basic imagery. It’s a fantastic springboard to jump off if you want a hit. Not all sequel/reboots have that luxury.
Anna Sawai as the translator Mariko in Shogun: the remake was more culturally accurate than the original.Credit: Katie Yu/FX
Shogun won huge plaudits for its recreation of historical Japan, its plot of manipulation and political intrigue, and its characterisations. It was also commended for being a more culturally accurate and considered adaptation than the 1980 miniseries also based on James Clavell’s novel. But that novel, and the miniseries, were hardly household names in 2024: the new adaptation, though having some established ground to work from, had plenty of work to do to let the public know what Shogun is – or was.
In its ensuing series it’ll have even more – the further you get from the source material, the more the writing room has to generate on their own, and the greater the risk of not only alienating fans of the old stuff, but of letting what was so appealing about the world you created in the first place slip away.
This is what happened to Game of Thrones, of course. Though wildly successful – as mentioned, witness the existence of House of the Dragon for proof – its last season drew resounding criticism, and precious few defenders (depending on who you ask, this might apply to the last two or three seasons). Many diagnosed the problem as the fact that, with GoT author George R.R. Martin famously dragging his feet on completing the book series, the makers of the show had to write their own storylines and resolve the various plot threads for themselves. And although they’d shown expert skill in translating Martin’s epic work to the screen, when they had no pre-existing basis on the page, they went off the rails: they didn’t have GoT in their bones, and it showed.
