Game of Thrones is over, and has left a gaping hole in the fantasy genre – a hole that multiple film and TV studios are eager to fill. Amazon is the favorite to achieve that, with their upcoming Lord of the Rings prequel series based on the novels and other published works of J.R.R. Tolkien, a five-season, billion-dollar commitment that apparently will also spawn a number of spin-offs and sequels.
That all sounds fantastic, but so far we’ve had barely any indication that this project is even still alive. They confirmed the show’s setting and time-period earlier this year through a series of posts on their official Twitter page, which was followed by a report that shooting would begin in Leith, Scotland, later this summer. John Howe, art director on Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, and Tom Shippey, a Tolkien scholar, both boarded the project at some point as well. There has been very little online chatter about the show, unless you (like I) habitually frequent sites like TheOneRing.net. But that might be about to change with the news that broke today, that Bryan Cogman is rumored to be either the director or a chief consultant for the show.
Cogman’s involvement with the series is interesting news for Tolkien purists who want the core themes of the book to be transferred to the screen – he served as “loremaster” for Game of Thrones, working to maintain fidelity to the George R.R. Martin novels, and has won multiple Emmy Awards. This is not going to please everyone, though – Cogman is now the third white male to board the project, following the firing of Sharon Tal Yguado at Amazon Studios. Jackson’s famous trilogy was extremely progressive in that it was largely written by two brilliant women; Jackson’s wife Fran Walsh and friend Philippa Boyens. Cogman, on the other hand, is in part responsible for some of the most controversial scenes in Game of Thrones history, such as the brutal torture and rape of Sansa Stark, something that (a) is undeniably a key element of Sansa’s brilliant character arc, but (b) was not in the original books and does have some suspiciously sexist overtones. Tolkien’s world is much “cleaner” than Westeros, and one wouldn’t expect to find such acts of violence in Middle-earth – though, then again, this series is not going to be set in the Middle-earth we know from the books and movies: this is going to be a story of an empire falling into decadence and decay, a civilization obsessed with death to the point of madness. This is a subject that has already been debated and argued for years, so I’m not going to dive too deeply into it, but I’ll leave it up to you to decide: is Cogman’s involvement a problem, or are you excited about this news?
(Benioff & Weiss, the Game of Thrones showrunners who have been the target of a LOT of backlash these last couple of weeks, are not involved in the show, by the way – nor are they likely to be, since they’re joining the Star Wars franchise).