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It will be interesting to see what deal they struck then and how long the BBC have got to wait for it. I know HBO stuff is normally shown on Sky Atlantic over here.
It will be interesting to see what deal they struck then and how long the BBC have got to wait for it. I know HBO stuff is normally shown on Sky Atlantic over here.
The BBC announced it had commissioned a TV adaptation of the trilogy in November 2015 with Bad Wolf and New Line Cinema making it.
HBO only came on as co-producer and international distributor in September 2018.
Did anybody watch the first episode last night? as personally l thought it was very good and a huge improvement on the 2007 film version.
I did. I agree.
I saw an artcle headline last night that said that they've incorporated parts of the Book Of Dust into this new production. I'm unfamiliar with it so won't be able to tell, but it seems sensible is the story timelines overlap.
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Re: His Dark Materials
It was well produced, and my youngest loved it (she’s a big fan of the Potter films so it’s right up her street). I enjoyed it as a piece of event TV. It’s good to see the BBC acknowledging that the golden age of TV we are now in is in large part driven by the fantasy genre, which our public service broadcasters pay far too little attention to.
However, I still don’t really like Pullman as a writer in this genre. Where fantasy is used as a lens to examine real-world issues it generally works best where those issues are ones that are hard to approach directly (so Star Trek, for example, was able to raise questions about sex and racial equality by locating it in space, in the 23rd century, while back in the 1960s it was still a hot potato). Pullman, as I’ve observed before, has a massive chip on his shoulder about organised religion and the Roman Catholic Church in particular. His Dark Materials presents the Catholic Church (one of whose less well known historic titles is “the Magisterium”) as a medieval inquisition clothed in Nazi chic. It’s about as subtle as a brick.
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Re: His Dark Materials
Given that it’s meant to be a story for upper primary/lower high school kids, it’s doing pretty well so far. It is suffering slightly from having been written by a high school English teacher who obviously has a very clear idea what a classic children’s story is supposed to be like, and has very deliberately set out to write one; it’s suffering further by being dramatised by people who grew up watching classic children’s literature being serialised by the BBC in the 1970s and 80s. Sure, it’s fantastical, but once you get used to the admittedly superb CG creatures that follow the main characters around there are long passages when it looks a bit ordinary. A lot of creeping up and down corridors. The occasional, grand-scale CG settings, like the university crypt, are the equal of Potter or Middle Earth as seen on the big screen, but scenes like that are, so far, few and far between. I’m hoping they’ve saved the budget for the crazy stuff still to come “up north”. We’ll still be watching it anyway as my youngest loves it, and to be fair she is the target audience.
I thought there had been a mix up somewhere I originally had it down for the 8th November and then everything else I saw subsequently said 16th so I assumed I had just made a mistake.
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I originally had it down for the 8th November and then everything else I saw subsequently said 16th so I assumed I had just made a mistake.
