The BBC has released a brief teaser for its upcoming adaptation of Philip Pullman’s classic fantasy trilogy, His Dark Materials, giving us a first look at the series and its characters. The teaser doesn’t say when the series will premiere, only that it’s “coming soon” to BBC One.
The BBC greenlit the show for an eight-episode season back in 2015, and ordered a second season last fall. The series is set in an alternate world in which people are accompanied by manifestations of their souls, shapeshifting animals called daemons. In the first novel, The Golden Compass, a girl named Lyra Belacqua (played by Logan star Dafne Keen) travels to the arctic to search for a friend who has been kidnapped. There, she discovers that a major church has been studying a phenomenon called Dust, an elementary particle that imparts consciousness in humans, something that the organization deems heretical.
This short teaser gives us a bit of what to expect for the series, showing off Keen’s Lyra, as well as the rest of the cast — Ruth Wilson as Church agent Mrs. Coulter, James McAvoy as Lord Asriel, Lin-Manuel Miranda as aeronaut Lee Scoresby, Clarke Peters as Dr Carne. Interestingly, there’s no sign anywhere of any of the characters’ daemons, and only the briefest of glimpses of the story’s trademark magical item, the alethiometer.
The trilogy was adapted for film by New Line Cinemas in 2005, but never gained the critical or popular reception of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, and the other two novels, The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass were never adapted, something this series will presumably cover.
