Terry Pratchett’s Discworld book series gets its own television series

Discworld, the fantasy book series by British author Terry Pratchett, is getting its own TV series. It is being made by Pratchett’s television production company Narrativia, in association with Motive Pictures and Endeavor Content.

The television series must remain “absolutely faithful” to the original material of the writer who died in 2015, Narrativia reports. It is not yet known which of the 41 Discworld books the companies will interpret for the small screen, nor when a first showing is planned.

The Guardian notes that it is somewhat striking that they work with different companies than in the production of The Watch, which is a series based on the police force of the same name from the Discworld books. BBC America is working on that, but recently published photos of that series have drawn much criticism from fans, who felt the visual style deviated too much from the images Pratchett painted in his books. A Narrativia head, however, denies that the choice to work with other companies has to do with the response to The Watch.

The first book in the Discworld series came out in 1983; the last book was published in the summer of 2014, despite the fact that the author was already suffering from dementia. In that comic fantasy series, Pratchett parodied well-known authors such as Tolkien, Lovecraft and Shakespeare. Although Pratchett indicated before his death that he would approve of his daughter Rhianna continuing the book series, she has indicated that neither she nor anyone else will be writing a new Discworld book.