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BBC Studios is adapting Terry Pratchett’s iconic Discworld books for a six-part TV series

BBC Studios is adapting Terry Pratchett’s iconic Discworld books for a six-part TV series

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Tentatively titled The Watch

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Sir Terry Pratchett’s long-running fantasy series Discworld is finally getting a TV adaptation from BBC Studios, according to a new report from Deadline.

Discworld is a massive series written by Pratchett — who died in 2015 — which spans 41 books, dozens of characters, and a variety of smaller, thematic sub-series within the larger work. This show will reportedly be a six-episode series, with a current working title The Watch. That implies that it’ll be based off one of the most popular subsets of the overall series, featuring the Ankh-Morpork City Watch, which grows from a ramshackle group of a couple officers trying to get by to a full-fledged city police force over the course of the series.

Pratchett’s series is broadly set on a magical flat world (the titular Discworld), which is in turn balanced on the back of four giant elephants, who stand on the back of an even larger giant turtle (Great A’Tuin). The individual novels in the series offer wildly different settings within this world, from the street-level investigations of the Watch books, to the international disc-spanning adventures of the bumbling Wizzard Rincewind, to the cosmic scale of the Death novels. Much of the action is centered on the city of Ankh-Morpork, a large city-state that serves as the home for many of the main characters, which slowly experiences its own form of an industrial revolution over the course of the series.

The massive size and scope of the series also means that there’s practically limitless potential for TV series in the Discworld books, too. According to Deadline, BBC Studios intends for the Discworld show to be a returnable franchise, which would make a lot of sense given the nature of the books.

Like the upcoming Good Omens TV show, the Discworld series will be co-produced by Narrativia (which owns the exclusive rights to all of Pratchett’s works). The company was founded by Pratchett in 2012 and is now run by producer Rod Brown, author Rhianna Pratchett (Pratchett’s daughter), and Rob Wilkins (Pratchett’s personal assistant and business manager).

This TV show wouldn’t be the first time the Discworld books have made their way to the screen, either: the UK TV channel Sky One has aired live-action versions of The Colour of Magic, Hogfather, and Going Postal in recent years.