TNT is bringing N.K. Jemisin’s Hugo Award-winning fantasy novel The Fifth Season to television, Deadline announced today. Leigh Dana Jackson (Sleepy Hollow, Helix) will adapt Jemisin’s novel, the first in the Broken Earth Trilogy, set on a supercontinent that every few centuries is wracked by a “fifth season” of climate change in the form of devastating earthquakes.
Jemisin excitedly shared the news on Twitter:
OhdearGodIthoughtIwasgonnablowagasketholdingthisin. Big news re THE FIFTH SEASON! https://t.co/FslJC4OrpM
— N. K. Jemisin (@nkjemisin) August 16, 2017
Jackson acquired the rights to The Fifth Season even before its Hugo nomination last year. Deadline describes the plot of the novel and its three protagonists:
The Fifth Season is described as an epic drama set in a world where civilization-destroying earthquakes occur with deadly regularity. A small minority of inhabitants has the ability to quiet these earthquakes, but they also can cause them. The series follows three women, each of whom possesses these special, Earth-controlling abilities: Damaya, a young girl training to serve the Empire; Syenite, an ambitious young woman ordered to breed with her bitter and frighteningly powerful mentor; and Essun, a mother searching for the husband who murdered her young son and kidnapped her daughter mere hours after a Season tore a fiery rift across the land.
Jemisin won the 2016 and 2017 Best Novel Hugo Awards for The Fifth Season and its follow-up, The Obelisk Gate. The final installment in the trilogy, The Stone Sky, was published August 15.
I predict reaction videos like we saw for the Red Wedding.
I hope they change the title, because it’d be very confusing to try talking about a TV series called The Fifth Season. “The fifth season of what? I thought it was a brand new show!” “Oh, just wait till you see what happens in the fifth season!” “But I’m already watching The Fifth Season! I’m up to the third season!” And imagine the confusion of the people who search unsuccessfully for the first four seasons on DVD…
that is awesome! also, @@@@@ 2, would make sense to call the tv series after, well, the series and just go with “the broken earth”. now, if you’ll excuse me, i need to get a copy of “the stone sky”.
@4/xbimpyx: Nearly every play Shakespeare ever wrote was an adaptation of a prior play, story, or historical event. Essentially every one of the American Film Institute’s top 10 American movies is an adaptation (e.g. Casablanca was based on a play, The Wizard of Oz and Psycho on books, Citizen Kane on a historical figure, On the Waterfront on a series of newspaper articles, etc.). Originality is not in where an idea comes from, it’s in where you take it.
In some parts of Germany the Fifth Season is carnival.
Dont get too excited about these announcements. A lot of great books or series get optioned and never make it to the screen. But a lit if them do. And either way the author gets paid, which is a good thing.