Dungeon Crawler Carl Just Got An Intriguing New Showrunner
Peacock’s wacky new series is leveling up.
Roleplaying games feel more popular — or, at least, more mainstream — than they’ve ever been, and that’s good for OG fans as much as for people who’ve never touched an RPG in their lives. In Hollywood’s endless hunt for fresh properties to adapt, popular roleplaying video games, tabletop RPGs, and books based on the thrill of playing a tabletop game are all in line for big-budget adaptations. HBO is developing a TV series based on Baldur’s Gate 3, one of the best Dungeons and Dragons games ever made. Amazon MGM has been toiling away at an adaptation of BioWare’s Mass Effect for years. Now Peacock is joining the effort with a series adaptation of Dungeon Crawler Carl, based on the sci-fi fantasy books by Matt Dinniman.
When Peacock first announced plans to adapt Dinniman’s eight-book series, it was with Thor: Ragnarok writer Chris Yost and Seth MacFarlane’s Fuzzy Door Productions at the helm. Dinniman will also serve as a producer, and Peacock is adding a promising new element that could further elevate the adaptation’s fantastical themes.
Shadow and Bone’s Eric Heisserer joins Chris Yost as DCC’s co-showrunner.
Yost has officially been bumped up to co-showrunner of Dungeon Crawler Carl. He’ll share duties with Eric Heisserer, the Oscar-nominated screenwriter of Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival. More recently, Heisserer served as showrunner of Netflix’s Shadow and Bone, another adaptation of an immensely popular fantasy book series. His expertise will likely come in handy for Dungeon Crawler Carl — Yost is well-versed in bringing comedy to heightened worlds, but Heisserer can help strike a healthy balance with this saga’s wackier elements and irreverent tone.
Dungeon Crawler Carl owes about as much to TTRPGs as it does to dystopian survival thrillers like The Running Man or The Hunger Games, but that unique genre mash-up is just one of the keys to its success. Dinniman’s series is also a little bit like Marvel’s Secret Wars, in that it takes place at the end of the world as we know it, in a realm assembled from the bits and pieces of a decimated Earth.
It’s in the “World Dungeon,” an 18-level arena designed by an alien corporation, that Dinniman’s hero earns his stripes. Carl becomes the subject of a survival show broadcast throughout the galaxy, where he levels up, brawls with aliens, and gains “loot” from viewer donations. The series is delightfully weird, so hopefully the team behind Peacock’s adaptation can keep the tone of Dinnaman’s books intact. With yet another promising writer in the mix, the show’s odds of success just got a little higher.
