HBO still wants to imagine a world where slavery is still legal in the southern United States, but it seems a galaxy far, far away has pushed things back a bit. With the end of Game of Thrones on the horizon, the next project for its showrunners was supposed to be a drama that redraws the end of the US Civil War with a much more racist conclusion.
Game of Thrones showrunners D.B. Weiss and David Benoiff are still slated to make Confederate for HBO, but things have been delayed a bit. Still, HBO president Casey Bloys is adamant that the controversy that came from the news that the show was even happening has nothing to do with the delay.
Speaking on Friday, Bloys made it clear that the network isn’t having second thoughts about two white showrunners making a show sure to depict a lot of racism and, well, slavery on screen. The reason for the delay is Star Wars.
“Dan and David are finishing up the final season [of Game of Thrones] and then they are going to go into the Star Wars universe,” Bloys said according to TVLine. “When they come out of that, I assume they will come back to us.”
The story notes that the duo has added people of color to the staff of the show that’s still in development, but the network wasn’t going to stop the creative team of Benoiff and Weiss from fulfilling a lifelong dream.
“The delay has to do with [the fact] that they were offered three movies,” he said.
Confederate‘s creative team also includes two prolific African-American writer-producers: Nichelle Tramble Spellman (The Good Wife) and Malcolm Spellman (Empire). In July, Bloys said that no Confederate scripts had been written yet.
The series’ gameplan is “really up to [Benioff and Weiss],” he added Friday. “It’s hard to say to someone, ‘You can’t go do Star Wars. They love it. It’s a childhood dream. They’ll go do that, remember why they love television and come back.”
It is hard to say no to a trilogy, especially when it’s a Star Wars trilogy. But HBO quietly pushing back a show that got them a lot of, well, push back, is probably a good idea. We’ll see if the finished product is as upsetting to HBO fans as the initial news of Confederate was last year.
[via TV Line]
