The first season of 'His Dark Materials' was, in our humble opinion, pretty spectacular - even if it wasn't necessarily clear what was going on half the time.
Not only that, it's one of a growing number of examples where a property is resurrected from a disappointing movie to a much better TV series. 'Watchmen', for example, was a pretty bland movie whereas the TV series continuation was far, far more involved and enjoyable.
The second season of 'His Dark Materials' follows Philip Pullman's sequel novel, 'The Subtle Knife', with a good few of the characters from the novel introduced in the first season. Andrew Scott is set to play Col. John Parry / Stanislaus Grumman, an Artic explorer who is able to shift between the two worlds. Dafne Keen is back as Lyra, as is Lin-Manuel Miranda and Ruth Wilson as Lee Scoresby and Marisa Coulter respectively.
You can see HBO are trying to push this as a potential replacement for 'Game of Thrones', minus the violence and the sex, and it's hard not to see why. For one, it has just as much depth and story as it and, on top of it, the final novel didn't exactly botch the entire thing.
The second season kicks off on BBC in November. Here's the trailer.
