Prime Video’s The Expanse Replacement Teased by Creators, & Why It “Annoyed & Confused” the Showrunner

When Syfy canceled The Expanse in 2018 after three seasons, the show’s fanbase launched one of the most audacious rescue campaigns in television history, crowdfunding a plane to fly a banner over Amazon Studios’ Santa Monica headquarters. That campaign worked, and Prime Video revived the series for three additional seasons, transforming a prematurely canceled cult curiosity into one of the greatest science fiction series of the 21st century. Across six seasons, the adaptation of Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck’s nine-novel saga — written under their shared pen name James S.A. Corey — earned a near-perfect 95% on Rotten Tomatoes, three Hugo Awards for Best Dramatic Presentation, and an endorsement from Game of Thrones author George R.R. Martin, who publicly declared that no other show “comes close.” While The Expanse has ended, Prime Video has already turned to its successor, an adaptation of Abraham and Franck’s new trilogy, The Captive’s War.

“It really annoyed and confused our showrunner, because we made it so freaking hard to adapt into a TV show,” Abraham told Polygon about the challenges of the new show. “The Captive’s War has a lot of things that would need a lot of work before they turn it into a screenplay: a lot of interiority in the characters, a lot of amazing, spectacular aliens. All of that stuff is challenging. And, yeah, we just leaned right into it. We didn’t make it easy.” That showrunner is Naren Shankar, who led The Expanse through its final three Prime Video seasons and is returning to helm The Captive’s War alongside director Breck Eisner, with the two reuniting through their shared production company, Expanding Universe. Abraham and Franck are also serving as screenwriters on the project, giving the adaptation the same creator-driven structure that made The Expanse so good.

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“The reality is that adaptation is a million tiny little blocks stacked on top of each other,” Franck added, underlining how fans shouldn’t expect a release date anytime soon. “At this point, I think we’ve stacked the third block. So, there are thousands of blocks to go before anybody would go, ‘Okay, so now let’s talk visual effects.’ At this point, we’re talking about things like, ‘Do we write a script?’”

Why Is The Captive’s War So Hard to Adapt?

The Captive’s War novels center on Dafyd Alkhor, a human research assistant on the planet Anjiin whose entire civilization is conquered by an alien empire called the Carryx. Dafyd and his fellow survivors are deported to the Carryx homeworld and forced to prove their species’ worth in a Darwinian competition against other enslaved races, with extinction as the cost of failure. Abraham has described the series as inspired by the biblical Book of Daniel, both stories of surviving inside a totalitarian empire without surrendering identity. This focus on the protagonist’s inner universe and deep philosophical discussion raises major challenges for the adaptation, as it’s hard to translate internal monologues, ethical conflict rendered through thought rather than action, and characters whose defining moments occur within their own minds.

On top of that, where The Expanse kept its extraterrestrial presence largely abstract, The Captive’s War populates its universe with a richly detailed spectrum of sentient species. The Carryx empire has subjugated dozens of alien civilizations, assigning each a specific function within its hierarchy, and it’s going to be hard to do justice to all these different creatures without blowing up the budget. As Franck perfectly puts it, “we were either done or mostly done with the first book before we had the discussions about adaptation. So we weren’t writing a book and a screenplay of that book in parallel.” However, while the book was imagined first and foremost as a piece of literature, they now have to figure out how to make it work on television.

Do you think that The Captive’s War can match The Expanse‘s legacy on Prime Video? Leave a comment below and join the conversation now in the ComicBook Forum!