George R.R. Martin’s ‘Nightflyers’ Has Been Ordered To Series, Sets Lead Actors

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We’ll be reluctantly waiting until 2019 for the final season of Game of Thrones, but thankfully other George R.R. Martin projects are coming along to keep us entertained, like a possible Game of Thrones prequel and a whole bunch of spin-offs, an adaptation of Nnedi Okorafor’s Who Fears Death for HBO, and now another series announced Thursday.

Nightflyers, the novella George R.R. Martin wrote sixteen years before the first book in his A Song of Ice and Fire series, has been ordered to series by SYFY, with Netflix co-producing and holding first-run rights outside the U.S. The TV adaptation of Nightflyers was written by Jeff Buhler (Jacob’s Ladder), while Robert Jaffe (who wrote the 1987 film adaptation of the same name) will serve as producer. Daniel Cerone of The Blacklist, The Mentalist, and Dexter will be showrunner.

Nightflyers follows eight maverick scientists and a powerful telepath who embark on an expedition to the edge of our solar system aboard The Nightflyer — a ship with a small tightknit crew and a reclusive captain — in the hope of making contact with alien life. But when terrifying and violent events begin to take place they start to question each other — and surviving the journey proves harder than anyone thought.

Hmm, it could use more dragons. Space dragons.

SYFY also announced the principal cast, which is sadly devoid of any dragons:

Gretchen Mol (Boardwalk Empire) is set to star as Dr. Agatha Matheson, alongside Eoin Macken (The Night Shift) as Karl D’Branin, David Ajala (Fast & Furious 6) as Roy Eris, Sam Strike (EastEnders) as Thale, Maya Eshet (Teen Wolf) as Lommie, Angus Sampson (Fargo) as Rowan, Jodie Turner-Smith (The Last Ship) as Melantha Jhirl, and Brían F. O’Byrne (Million Dollar Baby) as Auggie.

George R.R. Martin is one of the many executive producers on the series, but he won’t be writing, in part because of his exclusivity deal with HBO and also because he’s been very busy not writing Winds Of Winter.

(Via George R.R. Martin and SYFY)

Have you checked out the TV Avalanche podcast with Alan Sepinwall and Brian Grubb?

https://soundcloud.com/tvavalanche/episode-47-shows-were-looking-forward-to-in-2018