Game of Thrones Season 7 is now running on HBO, and it won’t be too long before it goes off, only to return for one final season, which might not arrive till 2019. Game of Thrones has been one of the most successful shows on TV, ever, and showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss are a huge reason for that. Now, as we already know, the pair will not be in charge of the prequel series that will follow Thrones, but instead, they will work on a new series, according to recent reports, it will be named Confederate. The series will be an alternate history civil war drama, with a prominent focus on slavery, and soon after the announcements, people were already reacting to it, with many fans responding negatively. In a recent interview with Vulture, the pair spoke up about the reactions, and the motif behind the show. Read on!
First off, Benioff explained how the idea came to the current form, and why they’ve brought in two more writers/exec producers, Nichelle Tramble Spellman (The Good Wife) and Malcolm Spellman (Empire) :
“We’ve been talking about this as a feature because we had an idea for a two-hour story. The more we talked, the more it evolved. And with the success we’ve had on Thrones, and how happy we’ve been with HBO, it’s really opened up storytelling possibilities and world-building possibilities, especially in a story like this, which we imagined being an ensemble with dozens of characters and multiple story lines, which frankly I think TV has done better with over the last ten-to-15 years. And once we realized it was going to be a bigger story, we knew we didn’t wanna do it by ourselves because we’re … lazy.”
Benioff said that they had been expecting the reactions that they received, and apparently the first thing Malcom said to him was :
“You’re dealing with weapons-grade material here.”
Now, we all know that a lot of fans have said that Game of Thrones needs more diversity, including actor John Boyega, recently. Dan Weiss was asked whether the reaction to Confederate could have been much more magnified because of the same thing. Weiss replied :
“We were very hyper-aware of the difference between a show with a fictional history and a fictional world, and a show that’s an alternate history of this world. We know that the elements in play in a show like Confederate are much more raw, much more real, and people come into them much more sensitive and more invested, than they do with a story about a place called Westeros, which none of them had ever heard of before they read the books or watched the show. We know they are different things, and they need to be dealt with in very, very different ways. And we plan, all of us I think, to approach Confederate in a much different spirit, by necessity, than we would approach a show named Game of Thrones.”
Sounds fair! Benioff then wrapped up their approach to the whole thing by saying this :
“This is scary, for all of us. It’s scary for different reasons. But it is a pretty terrifying prospect getting into it. We knew it would be, and now it’s come true. It’s obviously creating a lot of controversy before anything’s happened just on the basis of a press release, and that will only continue as we get closer. But even aside from that outside part of it, there’s just the frightening part of — we’re all gonna put a lot of pressure on ourselves to get it right. And that’s scary, but it’s also exciting. It’s what gets the adrenaline pumping and what gets you excited to sit down at your computer and start typing up themes and running them off the other three. And there hasn’t been anything since we started on Thrones that’s gotten me so excited to get back to writing new characters. So, I’m scared and also excited.”
What do you think about Confederate? Excited? While production has began, we expect it to enter proper development once Game of Thrones Season 8 wraps up, which means we will probably see it in 2019, or 2020. Maybe it will help us deal with the withdrawal from Game of Thrones. What do you think? Tell us in the comments, down below!
