HIS DARK MATERIALS casts Lyra and Lee Scorbie

The BBC adaptation of His Dark Materials has added two high-profile actors and announced the director for the first season.

Playing the lead and central role of Lyra Belacqua is 12-year-old Dafne Keen, riding high after her starring role in last year's hit X-Men movie Logan. The role of Lyra was previously played by Dakota Blue Richards in the 2007 movie misfire The Golden Compass. Keen was critically acclaimed for her role in Logan and has been tipped as a star of the future.

Playing the role of balloonist and adventurer Lee Scoresby is Lin-Manuel Miranda. Miranda is also riding high after creating, co-writing and co-scoring the hit musical Hamilton. Miranda is also producing, scoring and working in other roles on both the Kingkiller Chronicle movie adaptation trilogy and its TV spin-off for Showtime. Sam Elliott played the role in the 2007 movie version.

Tom Hooper, the director of The King's Speech, Les Miserables and Elizabeth I, will adapt the first season, which is expected to cover the bulk of the first novel in the series.

His Dark Materials, based on Philip Pullman's trilogy of the same name, will adapt all three books - Northern Lights, The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass - over five seasons (and not one, as some alarmist reports have said). Jack Thorne (Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, The Fades, Skins) is writing the scripts for the series.

The BBC is producing alongside Bad Wolf Productions and New Line Cinema (under the Warner Brothers aegis) and are looking for an American distribution and production partner, with Netflix expressing strong interest in the project.

Pre-production begins on the HIS DARK MATERIALS TV series

Bad Wolf Productions today confirmed that shooting is complete on their first project, a TV version of Deborah Harkess's novel A Discovery of Witches for Sky TV, which is interesting in itself. However, more exciting for many will be the news that Bad Wolf are rolling straight into working on their TV version of His Dark Materials, the Philip Pullman novel series.

His Dark Materials consists of the novels Northern Lights (retitled The Golden Compass in the United States for no immediately discernible reason), The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass. One of the biggest-selling YA fantasy series of all time, it's also controversial (mostly in the US) for its depiction of religion and criticism of dogma and fundamentalism. A previous attempt to adapt the series with a movie version of The Golden Compass in 2007 was a box office disappointment.

Writer Jack Thorne is working on the new version, which will adapt the three books as five eight-episode seasons. The BBC is funding and co-developing the project with Bad Wolf, New Line and Warner Brothers. Bad Wolf also has an American co-development deal with HBO (they are collaborating on Industry, a drama about the global financial crisis) which may see the show end up on HBO in the US, although this has not been confirmed.

Bad Wolf are also developing a TV series based on Bernard Cornwell's fantastic Warlord Chronicles novel trilogy, although it sounds like this may be on the backburner for now.

His Dark Materials will probably air in late 2019 or early 2020, assuming that they start shooting this year.

BBC and New Line (and HBO?) to adapt HIS DARK MATERIALS for television

The BBC has confirmed that it will be developing a TV series based on His Dark Materials, the bestselling children's novel trilogy by Philip Pullman. The books were previously adapted for a film, The Golden Compass (2007), but this was not successful enough to warrant sequels.

The novels in the series consist of Northern Lights (1995, retitled The Golden Compass in the USA), The Subtle Knife (1997) and The Amber Spyglass (2000). The books have sold just under 20 million copies and form arguably the most critically-acclaimed YA fantasy series of recent times. The books tell the story of Lyra Belacqua, a 12-year-old girl who grows up in an alternate-universe version of Oxford. As the story continues Lyra encounters sentient, armoured polar bears, travels between several parallel universes and becomes embroiled in an epic battle for the fate of creation.

His Dark Materials has been acclaimed for making a readable and entertaining story out of very weighty topics, touching on original sin, religion and faith. The trilogy is effectively an inversion of Milton's Paradise Lost, but celebrating the things that Milton criticised in that novel. It was also partially inspired by Pullman's dislike of the heavy Christian allegory in The Chronicles of Narnia, particularly the nihilistic ending to the series. The trilogy has been acclaimed for its narrative weight, but has proven controversial in Christian circles for taking a critical - or at least non-laudatory - viewpoint on Christianity specifically and religion in general. An organised Christian campaign to boycott the film has been partially blamed for its lacklustre box office performance in the United States.

The new adaptation is planned to take the form of five eight-episode seasons from Bad Wolf Productions, headed by former BBC executive Jane Tranter (credited with taking the formal decision to return Doctor Who to television in 2003) and ex-Doctor Who producer Julie Gardner, working in conjunction with New Line Television, the first TV venture from the film production company responsible for The Lord of the Rings trilogy and the Golden Compass movie. Bad Wolf Productions has also announced an American rights partnership with HBO, suggesting that HBO may be contributing to the budget of the projects Bad Wolf are developing. This alleviates the concerns that the project may not get the money it deserves.

This is a hugely ambitious project and the notion of the BBC, New Line and possibly HBO joining forces to bring it to the screen is very exciting.