His Dark Materials, the BBC/HBO adaptation of Philip Pullman’s trilogy, arrived in November 2019 as a three-season, 23-episode run. It gave the novels room to breathe and treated them with a seriousness the 2007 film version, The Golden Compass, never really found.
The Golden Compass got a mixed response, fell short at the box office, and ran straight into religious backlash because of Pullman’s criticism of organized religion. That pretty much ended the franchise before it could start. The BBC/HBO version, which premiered in November 2019, took a different approach: one book per season, with time for Lyra Belacqua’s story to unfold properly, from the world of animal-soul daemons to the mystery of the missing children and the larger conspiracy around Dust.
His Dark Materials worked because Jack Thorne and the rest of the creative team kept their attention on the people at the center of it, the moral strain running through the story, intercision, and the books’ bigger ideas about free will, authority, innocence, belief, and Pullman’s sharp anti-theocratic edge, rather than leaning only on spectacle.
If The Golden Compass put you off, this BBC/HBO adaptation is still well worth a look. His Dark Materials opened to 7.2 million viewers in the U.K. and around 700,000 across HBO platforms in the U.S., picked up strong reviews, saw Ruth Wilson’s Mrs. Coulter singled out again and again, won a BAFTA for visual effects, and stuck the landing with The Amber Spyglass.
You can watch the BBC/HBO adaptation now. The Book of Dust, meanwhile, is still only a possible follow-up, despite interest from Dafne Keen, James McAvoy, and Ruth Wilson, and despite the fact that no announcement has come so far.
Author: Jesús Bosque
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