“Game of Thrones” is ending after next season, but fans have been able to assuage their grief with the news that HBO is planning four new spinoffs. That Duggar-esque level of reproduction seemed impossible, then George R.R. Martin (on whose book series the show is based) announced that there will actually be five. Five! But anyone eagerly awaiting “Daenerys!” or “Cersei’s World” will be left unsatisfied.
Martin says all five shows, should they be made, will be prequels. “We are not talking ‘Joey’ or ‘AfterMASH’ or even ‘Frasier’ or ‘Lou Grant.’ So all of you who were hoping for the further adventures of Hot Pie are doomed to disappointment,” wrote Martin on his blog. “What we are talking about are new stories set in the ‘secondary universe’ (to borrow Tolkien’s term) of Westeros and the world beyond, the world I created for ‘A Song of Ice and Fire.'”
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The clarification is bound to cause much rending of RenFest costumes among Martin’s fanbase — both of the HBO series and his books. Martin’s commitment to developing the new shows means that his eagerly awaited next novel — “Winds of Winter,” the sixth in his “Ice and Fire” series — won’t be coming out anytime soon. “I will confess, I do wish I could clone myself, or find a way to squeeze more hours into the day, or a way to go without sleep. But this is what it is, so I keep juggling,” he wrote.
And the new series aren’t guaranteed. “Decades of experience in television and film have taught me that nothing is ever really certain,” said Martin, who predicted not all five shows will emerge from the steaming cauldron known as the TV-development process. “How many pilots will be filmed, and how many series might come out of that, remains to be seen.”
On the blog, Martin listed his commitments as “Winds of Winter,” the five TV pilots, four new “Wild Cards” books, “Fire and Blood” (a planned complete history of House Targaryen) and ideally not cardiac arrest.
