Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast novels are in development as a fantasy drama at Showtime, with Doctor Who writer Toby Whithouse, Good Omens showrunner Neil Gaiman and A Beautiful Mind’s Akiva Goldsman at the helm.
“The joy of trying to describe Gormenghast to people is one where words will fail you and that’s why there have been people who wanted to film Gormenghast ever since Peake wrote the first book," Gaiman told Deadline. "The BBC once tried but they were all making it in times when depicting the impossible on the screen was too difficult. The great thing now is that we can make it and actually show it and take you there. We are now in a world where you can put the impossible on screen and with Gormenghast, you’re not just dealing with a castle the size of a city but dealing with these incredibly glorious and memorable people.”
“The way that television just absolutely devours narrative means that it could be that we get [the first two] books into season one or much like American Gods, where season one ends halfway through the book,” Whithouse added.
The Gormenghast series follows the schemes and machinations of various castle attendants and their lords, all of whom live in Gormenghast Castle, a sprawling, medieval structure as big as a city. Peake originally wrote three novels in the series -- Titus Groan (1946), Gormenghast (1950) and Titus Alone (1959) -- before his death in 1968. Included in the deal is also Boy in Darkness (1956), a novella by Peake, and Titus Awakes, a posthumously published novel completed and published by Peake’s widow in 2009.
Showtime has already opened a writers room for the Gormenghast series, with a script-to-series commitment in hand.