The Dark Tower Showrunner Reveals Elements He Was Looking Forward To Adapting in Cancelled Series

Though the series is as dead as it can be, the first official details about Amazon‘s ambitious plans for adapting Stephen King‘s Dark Tower for television have finally been revealed. Series showrunner Glen Mazzara has spilled the beans on countless things about the proposed series and the pilot that was actually shot for the streaming network in a new interview with The Kingcast. The former The Walking Dead showrunner opened up about his intentions, offering a beat-by-beat breakdown of the first episode and the broad strokes of what the first three seasons would have been. Mazzara also made a note of the things he was especially interested in bringing to life, and naturally they’re the very bizarre elements from King’s novels.

“I was really looking forward to Blaine (The Mono),” Mazzara said. “I had ideas for that. I was really looking forward to (Father) Callahan. In fact, I was hoping to take Callahan’s backstory from the time that he leaves ‘Salem’s Lot to the time he ends up in Mid-World, I wanted to do that as its own mini-series. I didn’t think you could fit that into The Dark Tower proper, so I wanted to split that off. I had plans to hire the best joke writers in Hollywood to write when Roland and Susannah meet Dandelo. I really wanted that to be laugh out loud funny. There were all these things I was jonesing to do.”

Mazzara further confirmed that his intention with the series was to adapt the books for television and not work as a sequel of sorts to the novels like the 2017 feature film. That in mind he had a series of rules that he and the writers worked toward, with certain elements from the books that would not be changed.

“I had a rule with the writers that if something was really, really important that we were going to try to make canon work. There was never going to be a version where Roland did not shoot his mom. There was never going to be a version in which Susan lives. There was never going to a version in which Roland doesn’t drop Jake.”

You can listen to the full episode of The Kingcast to learn even more about Mazzara’s plans for the series.

What elements from The Dark Tower were you most eager to see in a TV series? Sound off in the comments below and talk to me on Twitter about all things Dark Tower @TheSpencerPerry.