Terry Brooks’ Epic Fantasy Series ‘Shannara’ Coming to TV

“Scions of Shan­nara”  art­work by Keith Parkin­son

Way back in 2008 I did a round-up of my most-anticipated fan­tasy films for the year 2009, which included Elf­s­tones of Shan­nara, the first book in Terry Brooks’ epic Shan­nara tril­ogy, which, at the time was still in devel­op­ment . Well, that movie obvi­ously never mate­ri­al­ized (while I’m on the sub­ject, that entire list I put together turned out to be one big shit­pile of dis­ap­point­ment) but accord­ing to new news today the Shan­nara series will be re-worked for TV instead.

Vari­ety reports:

Sonar Enter­tain­ment has acquired the rights to author Terry Brooks’ best­selling fan­tasy series “Shan­nara” and is part­ner­ing with Farah Films to pro­duce a tele­vi­sion series based on the books.

Farah Films prin­ci­pal Dan Farah and Sonar Enter­tain­ment CEO Stew­art Till will exec pro­duce with Brooks. Pro­duc­ers plan to recruit a showrun­ner and direc­tor before they shop the project to net­work buyers.

Set hun­dreds of years after the destruc­tion of our civ­i­liza­tion, series fol­lows the Shan­nara fam­ily, who are empow­ered with ancient magic and whose adven­tures con­tin­u­ously reshape the future of the world. The plan is to base the show’s first sea­son on “The Elf­s­tones of Shan­nara,” the sec­ond book in the series.

The 20th best­selling book in the 25-year-old series has just pre­miered at No. 2 on the New York Times Best­sellers list. Two more books in the series are set to be pub­lished in 2013.

[via Vari­ety ]

I’m all for more fan­tasy series being adapted for tele­vi­sion ver­sus big-budget movies. It’s not that I don’t love the Lord of the Rings films, it’s just that most fan­tasy films that  aren’t  LOTR have been huge dis­ap­point­ments (Eragon, The Seeker)  or weren’t very suc­cess­ful ( The Golden Com­pass ), not to men­tion it sucks hav­ing to wait so long in between install­ments (The Hob­bit) . Until we can clone Peter Jack­son so he can direct every epic fan­tasy film, I believe tele­vi­sion is the bet­ter option.

It’s unlikely the Shan­nara series will de-throne Game of Thrones as best fan­tasy book-to-TV series, because, frankly, the books them­selves just aren’t as juicy as what George R. R. Mar­tin writes and HBO has set the bar pretty high. How­ever, I’m glad Game of Thrones  has become some­thing of a paragon that’s inspir­ing pro­duc­ers to con­sider more shows like it. Fan­tasy series that are as ridicu­lously long as A Song of Ice and Fire or Wheel of Time   can’t be eas­ily dis­tilled into two-hour movies fit for gen­eral con­sump­tion*. With made-for-TV spe­cial effects and pro­duc­tion val­ues get­ting bet­ter all the time plus the advance­ments in second-screen tech­nol­ogy and social media gen­er­at­ing huge suc­cesses for the net­works, why not bring more fan­tasy books to tele­vi­sion instead of the big screen?

*Unless it’s Harry Pot­ter .

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