All the updates for the BBC’s His Dark Materials series

The BBC and HBO unveiled a new trailer for their upcoming TV series, His Dark Materials, showing off a fantastical world where a war is brewing between an authoritarian Church and those who resist it.

Based off the book series by Philip Pullman, the series is set in an alternate world where every person has their own shapeshifting, animal-shaped companion, a manifestation of their soul. These companions are called Daemons. The story follows a young girl named Lyra Belacqua (played by Logan’s Dafne Keen) who grows up as an orphan in Oxford. When children begin vanishing, including her best friend Roger, she sets off into the Arctic to find him, and discovers a conspiracy involving her world’s domineering Church.

HBO’s Game of Thrones is coming to an end this weekend, and once it’s over, the network will have to figure out what its next big hit will be. One possibility is its forthcoming adaptation of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy. You can get a glimpse of that today: HBO just released the first real trailer for the upcoming fantasy series.

Pullman’s fantasy trilogy (The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, and The Amber Spyglass as well as his ongoing sequel trilogy, which started with The Book of Dust in 2017) is certainly epic in scale. Set in an alternate world where one’s soul manifests as a shape-shifting animal called a Daemon, it follows a young girl named Lyra Belacqua (played in the series by Logan star Dafne Keen) who travels to the Arctic to find her friend Roger. He (and other children in her version of Oxford) has been kidnapped by The Church, which is experimenting on them as it studies the nature of an elemental particle called Dust. That particle appears to be the stuff that imbues people with consciousness, and that’s something that the Church has deemed heresy. Lyra’s journey brings her on a considerable adventure across worlds and lands her in the midst of a massive war being waged across existence.

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.

The BBC’s adaptation of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy hasn’t aired yet, but the network has already renewed the series for a second season, reports Deadline.

The series will adapt Pullman’s The Golden Compass and, presumably, its follow-ups The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass. The epic series is set in an alternate world similar to ours except human souls are manifested externally as an animal that shape-shifts until puberty when it settles into a final form. Its protagonist is a girl named Lyra Belacqua who sets off for the Arctic to rescue a kidnapped friend and stumbles into a conspiracy by this universe’s equivalent of the Catholic Church to uncover and exploit the nature of a particle known as Dust. The Golden Compass was adapted as a film in 2007. Last year, Pullman released La Belle Sauvage, the first installment of the companion trilogy The Book of Dust.

The BBC has lined up its star for its upcoming adaptation of Philip Pullman’s novel, The Golden Compass: Logan star Dafne Keen, reports Deadline (via io9). The King’s Speech director Tom Hooper will also helm the 8-part series.

The fantasy novel follows the adventures of Lyra Belacqua, a child from an alternate world in which people’s souls physically manifest as shape-shifting animals called daemons. Keen is best known for her role in last year’s X-Men film, Logan, where she played X-23, a young, cloned version of Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine. She’ll play Lyra, the main character in the novel, who sets off into the arctic to search for a kidnapped friend, and discovers a larger threat involving a the nature of a mysterious phenomenon known as Dust.

For more than a decade and a half, Philip Pullman has talked about a companion novel to his acclaimed fantasy trilogy His Dark Materials. Earlier this year, he revealed that fans of The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, and The Amber Spyglass would not only finally get to read The Book of Dust, but that it was a trilogy, with the first installment, La Belle Sauvage, hitting bookstores today.

With the arrival of The Book of Dust, it’s worth looking back on Pullman’s dazzling trilogy. While readers have enjoyed a glut of great YA fantasy novels in the last two decades, His Dark Materials particularly stands out because of Pullman’s unwillingness to compromise a complex ethical and moral story for his younger audience, and his determination to move beyond a simple story of good versus evil.