Season 2 of The Expanse began airing yesterday in the United States on SyFy, to a strong critical reception. Fans outside the US were confidently expecting to watch the show today, as Netflix have picked up the rights outside the United States and their usual release schedule is one day after US transmission. However, this is not the case with The Expanse. Some sources are reporting that SyFy actually has an exclusivity period and the show will not be released on Netflix until Season 2 finishes airing in the States in May.
This is a very curious move. International sales are increasingly important to American shows, especially expensive ones (The Expanse is SyFy's highest-budgeted show of all time), and pre-selling a show's international rights to Netflix or Amazon for release within a day or two of the American transmission is a great way of ensuring a global audience is built up, fees are paid and piracy is minimised. Preventing the show from reaching an international audience for twelve weeks seems self-defeating, since this cannot but encourage piracy in the short term for the most devoted fans.
A spotty and poor international release scheme for The Expanse's first season (which was not available in the UK until the end of last year) was a big mistake and own goal for SyFy. This is not quite as bad a mistake, but it's a curious and backwards move which, once again, seems almost deliberately designed to stop the show gaining the profile and momentum it really needs.
Season 2 of The Expanse hits SyFy (in the US) and Netflix (almost everywhere else) next week. This trailer came out a little while ago but I didn't post it at the time so here it is.
Season 2 debuts on 1 February (that's Wednesday) in the US, with each episode being made available a day or so later in other Netflix territories.
Season 2 should resolve the remaining storylines from the first Expanse novel, Leviathan Wakes, and start drawing on the events of the second novel, Caliban's War.
SyFy have released a new trailer for The Expanse and confirmed that it will be airing in the United States from 8 February 2017.
Season 2 will utilise elements from the first two novels of the series, Leviathan Wakes and Caliban's War and introduce Frankie Adams as new castmember Bobbie Draper, a Martian marine.
The Expanse Season 1 is now available in many territories (including the UK and Ireland) on Netflix. Season 2 is expected to debut on SyFy within 24 hours of US transmission.
The news is surprising as a previous deal with Amazon had been mooted, with it sounding like a done deal. Clearly Netflix put up a superior offer to acquire the show, which has had a patchy international distribution pattern to date.
This is a canny move by Netflix to enhance their space opera programming. Netflix recently acquired the rights to all six Star Trek TV series outside of the US and will show the seventh, Star Trek: Discovery, starting in May 2017.
Meanwhile, Daniel Abraham, co-author of The Expanse novels (alongside Ty Franck, with both writing as James S.A. Corey), has posted an image from Season 2 showing fan-favourite new character Bobbi Draper in her power armour on the surface of Mars.
Season 2 of The Expanse is expected to air in early 2017. The sixth Expanse novel, Babylon's Ashes, is released next month.
Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck, who in gestalt form are known as James S.A. Corey, have confirmed that the fan-favourite character of Bobbie Draper has been cast for the second season of The Expanse.
New Zealand actress Frankie Adams has been cast in the role. Adams is a relative newcomer, but impressed Abraham and Franck with her audition and they lobbied for her to be cast. Adams is an actress of Samoan descent and is over six feet tall. She is also an amateur boxer. The mix of acting skill and physical presence was deemed perfect for the role of Draper, a Martian marine who gets mixed up in a crisis on Ganymede in the novel Caliban's War.
The Expanse's second season begins production shortly, to debut on SyFy in January 2017. A UK airdate for the series or the DVD/Blu-Ray (already available in the States) has still not been set.
SyFy's new space opera TV series, The Expanse, has had its debut date brought forward. It will still first air on SyFy on 14 December, but the first episode will be premiered on digital providers starting on 23 November, or less than three weeks from now.
The first episode will be released on the following digital platforms: SyFy.com, SyFy On Demand, SyFy Now, Hulu, Amazon, Google Play, Vudu, YouTube, iTunes, Facebook, X-Box and PlayStation. In addition, Twitch, Wikia, IGN, IMDb, Crave Online and Roku will feature exclusive content as well as the episode. Most interesting is the news that online book community Goodreads will also get to host the episode with exclusive digital content.
The first season of The Expanse is based on Leviathan Wakes, the first novel in the Expanse space opera series by James S.A. Corey (aka Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck), although it will also introduce characters and elements from the second novel, Caliban's War, to better set up the second season. There are ten episodes in the first season and pre-production has already started on the second season, which will be ready to go as soon as SyFy give it the go-ahead. The Expanse is SyFy's most expensive and ambitious project of all time, dwarfing the resources it expended even on Battlestar Galactica.
Set 200 years in the future when control of the Solar system is split between an overpopulated Earth, a militant Mars colony and the scattered mining communities in the asteroid belt, the story focuses on the search for a missing woman, Julie Mao, who holds the key to the balance of power in the Solar system. The series will star Thomas Jane as Detective Joseph Miller, Steven Strait as Jim Holden, Dominique Tipper as Naomi Nagata and Shohreh Aghdashloo as UN Undersecretary Chrisjen Avasarala. Fans of genre TV will also be interested in seeing Chad Coleman (The Walking Dead and The Wire) and Jonathan Banks (Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul) in recurring roles.
Details of the show's international distribution have not been finalised. Most notably, it is not yet known what UK station will be showing the series and when.
SyFy has greenlit a 10-episode TV series based on James S.A. Corey's Expanse series of SF novels.
The Expanse consists of three published novels to date (Leviathan Wakes, Caliban's War and Abaddon's Gate), with the fourth book, Cibola Burn, due in June. There are also several short stories and novellas available in the setting. The author, James S.A. Corey, is a pen-name for fantasy author Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck, whose day is being George R.R. Martin's assistant.
Mark Fergus and Hawk Ostby (Children of Men, Iron Man) are attached as writers, executive producers and probably show-runners, with casting and the hiring of directors due to start soon.
"The Expanse is epic in scale and scope and promises to be Syfy's most ambitious series to date," Syfy president Dave Howe said.
"Bringing this coveted book franchise to television with our partners
at Alcon and the Sean Daniel Co. is a giant win for Syfy, reinforcing
our overall strategy to produce bold, provocative and compelling sci-fi
fantasy stories. The Expanse joins a killer lineup of high-concept, high-quality series, along with recently announced original projects Ascension, 12 Monkeys, the renewal of Helix, and the soon to premiere Dominion."
This is interesting news. SyFy's commitment to returning to proper SF after years of cheesy B-movies and pointless repeats of wrestling is welcome, although so far not exactly paying off: Helix in particular is a dreadful television series. But with the right cast and crew, The Expanse (with its budget-friendly claustrophobic starships and space stations) could be done very well. I'd like to see a more accomplished space opera series on screen, like The Night's Dawn Trilogy, The Revelation Space Series or The Gap Series, but those would all be bigger-budgeted propositions and will probably have to wait until someone with the resources of HBO (or even AMC, Starz or Showtime) decide they want their own big-budget SF series.
The Expanse, the six-volume space opera series written by Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck under the pen-name James S.A. Corey, has been optioned for television by Alcon Television Group.
The Expanse consists of the published novels Leviathan Wakes, Caliban's War and Abaddon's Gate, with three more books projected. Set in the 22nd Century, it depicts tensions in a colonised Solar system that are heading to war. Government and corporate conspiracies abound, as does the possible discovery of alien life.
Mark Fergus and Hawk Ostby will be writing the pilot episode and will co-produce. They are best known for writing the script for the original Iron Man film, as one of the drafts of the film Children of Men.
Alcon Television Group is developing the series internally before shopping it to networks. It remains to be seen which ones will be interested. This is obviously great news for Daniel and Ty, and it'll be interesting to see how it develops.
An alien protomolocule has taken root on Venus. Earth and Mars are in a shooting match over an incident on Ganymede. The Solar system is moving towards all-out anarchy and war, and it falls to a well-meaning meddler, a canny politician, a Martian marine and a grief-stricken botanist to try to stop the descent into madness.
Caliban's War is the second novel in The Expanse series, following on from last year's well-received Leviathan Wakes. This is old-school space opera, featuring the crew of a spacecraft as they attempt to save the Solar system from an alien menace. The series features some nods towards serious science - the ships work strictly by Newtonian physics and there is no FTL travel, with the scope of events being limited (so far) to the Solar system alone - but it's certainly not hard SF. The emphasis is being on an entertaining, fast-paced read, and the book pulls this off with aplomb.
The cast of characters has been expanded in this volume, with only Holden returning as a POV character from the first volume. Unlike the first novel, which had a grand total of two POVs, this second volume features four: Holden, UN politician Avasarala, botanist Prax and marine Bonnie. This means that the authors have three major new characters to introduce us to, as well as continuing the storyline from the first novel and evolving the returning cast of characters (Holden and his crew). This results in the pace being marginally slower than in Leviathan Wakes, although certainly not fatally so. Indeed, Abraham and Franck imbue the new characters with interesting backstories, motivations and quirks. It's also quite amusing that the most enjoyable character in an action-packed space opera is a 70-year-old politician with a potty mouth.
There's some major shoot-outs, a few big space battles, a close encounter with a rampaging monster in a zero-gravity cargo hold and other action set pieces that are handled well, but the book falters a little in its handling of politics (which are fairly lightweight) and the characterisation of the bad guys, who never rise above the obvious.
Caliban's War (***½) is not as accomplished as its forebear but is still a page-turning, solidly enjoyable read. The novel is available now in the UK and USA.
Via their James S.A. Corey Facebook page, Ty Franck and Daniel Abraham have confirmed that the third book in The Expanse space opera series will be called Abbadon's Gate, following up on last year's Leviathan Wakes and Caliban's War (due in a couple of months).
Also on the same Facebook page, the authors reveal that there will be a give-away of ARCs for Caliban's War closer to the release date. In the meantime, Orbit also have a sample of the novel available.
Update: Daniel Abraham has confirmed that Abaddon's Gate replaces the original working title for Book 3, Dandelion Sky:
"The consensus (probably accurately) was that Dandelion Sky was a
little too pastoral and Ray Bradbury for the book as it is."
It's worth noting an unfortunate similarity between the new title and Warhammer 40,000. The principal villain of WH40K, Abaddon the Despoiler, captured the Cadian Gate during a recent in-setting military campaign, leading to the two words cropping up a lot in those works. I doubt many people would confuse the two, but it's something the publishers might want to bear in mind.
