The Winter King on MGM has been cancelled. I am not at all surprised. It deserved to be. I called the show a “crushing disappointment” in my review, and I stand by that.
My only sadness comes from the knowledge that yet more of favorite books have been despoiled in such a horrific manner by the carelessness and arrogance of writers who think they know better than the authors whose work they’re meant to adapt. The Winter King was killed by this arrogance. This is karma. I shed no tears.
I’m a huge fan of Arthurian legend. Since I was young I’ve been fairly obsessed with all the different takes on the stories of Arthur, Lancelot, Guinevere and the Knights of the Round Table. From The Once and Future King to Stephen Lawhead’s Pendragon Cycle to The Mists of Avalon or the newly published book from Lev Grossman, The Bright Sword, or even silly movies like Monty Python and the Quest for the Holy Grail, I’m what you might call a superfan. I’ve even dabbled in Arthurian tabletop RPGs like the game Pendragon. Then, of course, there are many film adaptations—both good and bad—from Excalibur to The Green Knight to The Sword in the Stone (all good) to Guy Ritchie’s unfortunate King Arthur, one of his weaker films.
But very near the top of my favorites list are the Warlord Chronicles by Bernard Cornwell, one of the great luminaries of historical fiction. Cornwell is perhaps best known for his Sharpe novels which were turned into a terrific series starring Sean Bean before he became Boromir or Ned Stark. Cornwell’s Saxon Chronicles were the basis for Netflix’s hit series The Last Kingdom. But my favorite of Cornwell’s works was always the Warlord series. The first book in that series is The Winter King and it tells the story of Arthur in a way we don’t often see: Stripped of most of its legend and told in a way that is as historically accurate as possible, while still including the characters from all the stories made up long after the Britons had been conquered by Saxons, Danes and Normans.
The Arthurian legend may have begun in what we now call Wales, but it has taken on new life and new grandeur over the centuries, most notably in the collection of tales Le More d’Arthur by Sir Thomas Malory and published by William Caxton in 1485 (at least the most famous version of that era). Malory himself remains an obscure historical figure, whose identity has never been confirmed, but his compilation is the foundation of the Arthur legend and its many branches.
Cornwell’s version was unique in that it unburdened itself of all the chivalric late-Medieval trappings that had effectively modernized Arthur, transporting him out of Wales and making him a good English king. It was Edward I, and later his grandson Edward III, that brought Arthur and his legend into the English court, giving him plate armor and chivalric inspirations, jousting tourneys and all the rest. But a historically accurate Arthur would have lived nearly 1,000 years earlier in the fifth century, long before the Saxons had overthrown Arthur’s people, and hundreds of years before Edward’s forebear, William the Conqueror, had invaded England from his lands in Normandy. The Plantagenets may have revered Arthur, but they stole another culture’s folk hero in the process. Cornwell sought to give Arthur back to that ancient people, in a sense.
In Cornwell’s books, there are no knights in the way we imagine them, with plumed helms and shining plate mail. The 5th century was the beginning of the Dark Ages in Britain. The Roman Empire had fallen and its legions fled the green shores of what we now know as England. The roads and walls built by the Romans had begun to crumble. So had the knowledge and civilization these foreigners had brought with them to this distant, misty land.
Now, the land is divided into small kingdoms and different warring tribes of Picts, Britons, Saxons and others. Christianity is coming, and the old ways are long gone, stomped under the boot of Roman conquest. Most of the druids are dead. Cornwell’s Merlin is one of the last of his kind, a lecherous old schemer, intent on preserving Britain and its old druidic ways in the face of encroaching Christianity. His power comes not from fantastical magic, but from his role as a druid in a deeply superstitious society. Battles are fought with shield walls and crude weapons. There is no jousting. Castles are not huge stone fortresses, but rather small wood-and-earth affairs.
I list all of this off to make a point: The television adaptation of The Winter King ignores just about everything that made Cornwell’s brilliant trilogy what it is. The historical accuracy is thrown out the window and replaced with a multicultural and diverse 5th century Britain that did not exist at this point in time, despite Cornwell including an African character, Sagramor, as one of Arthur’s knights (a veteran of the Roman army who remained behind). The magical-realism has been replaced with blatant magic. The sense of place and time has been run over roughshod.
While I have no problem with ahistorical shows like The Great or My Lady Jane (which I loved, by the way because it never pretended to be historically accurate) playing fast and loose with details like this, I expect a show like The Winter King to lean into historical accuracy at every turn since that is the entire point of the books.
I would be just as upset had they bedecked all the characters in 15th century plate armor, because that also would go against the very point of the Warlord Chronicles. Making Merlin young is just as bad in many ways, since the entire point of Merlin in Cornwell’s books is that he is an old, crude, unlikeable man who will do anything to get what he wants.
Adding magic—actual, visible magical spells—to the series is even more galling, as is making Merlin’s home Avalon instead of Ynys Wydryn. But the list goes on and on and on. The story Cornwell told was not the same one told in this adaptation, which replaces Cornwell’s well-crafted dialogue with a bunch of pablum and changes huge swaths of the books in ways that convinced me the show’s creators had only read a Wikipedia article about the series rather than the books themselves or, having read the books, sneeringly discarded them to be replaced with their own ideas.
Unsurprisingly, the end result was not particularly good. The actors were fine for the most part, but the story was generic and bland, disregarding the books at every turn. The only thing that really remained true to the source material was the title, The Winter King. This is one show I gave up on after a few episodes (similar to how I gave up on Halo, another rotten adaptation)—and I’ve stuck around through Night Country, Willow, The Rings Of Power and more. You have not seen what I have seen.
Sometimes it’s just too much. People always tell me “just don’t watch it if you don’t like it” but I will say that historically speaking, if I decide to do that, the show is almost certainly doomed. Taste is subjective, but the data suggests that if I give up on a show, it’s almost certainly headed toward cancellation. Be careful what you wish for.
Also, did it never occur to anyone that maybe this was a poor casting choice for Derfel?
Or that giving up on the narrative structure of the books—in which an old monk recounts his youth with Arthur and Merlin and the wars and betrayals and conflict of those years—was a bad idea, given how effective that could have been?
The Winter King could have been a huge hit. The books are genuinely great. Even Cornwell has admitted that they were his favorite out of all the many books he’s written. If the show’s creators had stuck to the source material (making only necessary changes for an adaptation to the screen) this could have easily been a solid three-season slam dunk for MGM. Instead, they were either too lazy or too arrogant to be bothered to even pretend and instead “made it their own” because for some reason a great madness has taken over Hollywood, and every modern writer thinks they’re writing to impress a very small—but gratingly vocal—niche. Enough, I say. This is not the path toward positive or progressive change.
As George R.R. Martin recently wrote on the problems with modern screenwriters and showrunners: ““The book is the book, the film is the film,” they will tell you, as if they were saying something profound. Then they make the story their own. They never make it better, though. Nine hundred ninety-nine times out of a thousand, they make it worse.”
The sad fact is, this show deserved to be cancelled because it was not, in any way shape or form, The Winter King. It was neither a faithful adaptation of Cornwell’s books or an attempt to paint a historically accurate version of Arthur. Like Willow on Disney+ fans who loved the original would have been better off with no adaptation at all. I, for one, am tired of this constant drive to gear everything toward this mythical “modern audience” that, for the life of me, I cannot find out here in the real world, who are only vocal online and yet have somehow taken over vast swaths of entertainment, much to the detriment of good storytelling, comedy, and art.
Here, I will make it simple: Tell great stories and audiences will show up. Tell honest, true stories and audiences will listen. Tell stories about lots of different cultures and peoples, times and places, and tell them authentically and people will watch. Hire great writers and showrunners with experience to craft these stories, and ratings and reviews will reflect that. But make every single show, from The Acolyte to True Detective: Night Country a piece of political propaganda, where a narrow political worldview somehow supersedes the very fundamentals of what makes great entertainment or art, and people will tune out. Give these wildly expensive shows to untested showrunners and writers but please don’t act surprised when The Rings Of Power loses over half its audience between seasons.
Good riddance, I say. We’ve been warning you. We’ve been pointing out the cracks in this great, burgeoning edifice. Willow cancelled and deleted. The Acolyte cancelled. The Winter King cancelled. Marvel movies and shows failing left and right. So much potential squandered. So many great books and older movies tainted. Perhaps it is time to consider why all these popular things are failing so badly, and why so much money is being squandered by companies who should know better. I mean, why even buy the rights to something if you’re just going to ignore everything that made it great in the first place? Madness. Sheer madness. What a waste.
Go read the book. The book is better.
