Master Chief will be "a lead character" in Showtime's upcoming Halo TV series , Showtime's President of Programming Gary Levine told IGN, although he won't be the only protagonist in the series.

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The series is such an "enormous undertaking," Levine said, the premium cable network is aiming to air the series in 2020, and confirmed that Halo's TV adaptation will be set in "multiple locations" on "foreign planets," meaning that they'll likely shoot on a studio backlot rather than try and find foreign countries to serve as backdrops, the way big-budget shows like Game of Thrones have.During Showtime's panel at the Television Critics Association summer press tour, Levine and Showtime President and CEO David Nevins shed some light on the hotly-anticipated adaptation, which they declined to call their attempt at replicating the success of Game of Thrones."It is a very different genre, it’s futuristic, space-based science-fiction, it’s not fantasy," Nevins pointed out. "It took us a long time to get the script but we felt like we had something that was really interesting and felt like it belonged on Showtime in terms of its character depth, and it’s gonna be a big show.""We made a conscious decision to hire a writer not known for sci-fi and not known for big battle movies, because that’s already baked into the Halo franchise and we will service that, but we also wanted to ensure that we were getting beneath the formidable armor of the Spartans and really getting inside the human drama so it felt like it belonged on Showtime," Levine added. "As David said, our hopes and dreams are that it will have enormous appeal to Halo fans and will also appeal to Showtime drama fans."As for the difficulty of having a lead character whose face you never see, Levine admitted that that aspect of Master Chief's character "is a key question and an important part of our series, is all I’ll say."When asked if the show would tell an original story or draw from the existing source material, Levine said, "It is a new story but we are being incredibly respectful of the canon and working with the Microsoft/343 people to be sure we don’t violate any of that."Kyle Killen (Awake) will write and serve as showrunner, with Rise of the Planet of the Apes director Rupert Wyatt helming multiple episodes in the 10-episode first season. The show has not yet started production, but Nevins confirmed he's read scripts and feels that Killen has created a "brilliant, expansive world" that will position Halo as Showtime's "most ambitious series ever."