So, you’re a huge fan of Game of Thrones’ shocking, gory deaths and sexposition scenes. You stumble across Jacqueline Carey’s equally intriguing series Kushiel’s Legacy, with its throne-stealing, bedhopping, and god-marked heroine. And you think, This sounds like it would be my new favorite high fantasy TV series! Why has no one adapted it?
Carey agrees! And you if you’ve ever tweeted her a question about it, she wants you to know that she’s already been thinking a lot about it.
Carey updated her website today, not because she had any particular news to report, but to address these very questions, which have been coming more and more frequently since HBO premiered Game of Thrones in 2011.
The long and short of it is: We’re still going to have to wait a long while to see anguisette courtesan/spy Phèdre nó Delaunay, her loyal protector and consort Joscelin Verreuil, and her onetime patron, the devious lady Melisande Shahrizai, loving as they wilt and journeying beyond the borders of Terre d’Ange. It’s a bit of a catch-22: With the popularity of The Tudors and Game of Thrones, this couldn’t be a more perfect time for such a sex-positive series—and lush fantasy world—to be adapted. However, thanks to those same series, no network is biting at the moment.
Even GRRM himself wants to see Kushiel’s Legacy be the next big series to binge-watch. Although all eyes seem to be fixed on GoT, as Carey explains:
In fact, when I ran into George R.R. Martin at WorldCon a couple of years ago, he asked, “So when are they going to make a series out of your books?” I laughed and said, “Apparently, there’s this Game of Thrones series that’s sucking up all the oxygen!” He squinted at me and said, “No! It was supposed to open doors!”
Carey concludes the update on a cautiously optimistic note, reiterating that the time is now for even more people to discover her books:
After having watched three seasons of Game of Thrones (I don’t have HBO, so I catch up by binge-watching DVDs), I will say this: I now believe that Kushiel’s Legacy could be made into a pretty damn awesome series, one that gets the delicious nuance of the intrigue, the epic scope of the plot(s), the pageantry of the battles, and that confronts the erotic aspect head-on.
That said, she did express some reservations about how Phèdre’s first-person narration would translate to TV (where “you’re looking at the characters”). She should comfort herself with the fact that the ASOIAF books juggled multiple perspectives, which the GoT showrunners have communicated pretty handily.
Oh, and she would want “the new Tatiana Maslany” to play Phèdre, to which we say, Yes.
