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Game of Thrones showrunners get turned down by HBO

HBO has said, "Thanks, but no thanks" to a new series from Game of Thrones creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss.

Confederate, which had been in development at the cabler for a number of years, will not be moving forward, according to HBO programming chief Casey Bloys (via TV Line). The alt-history drama was first announced way back in July 2017.

The very premise of the would-be series made it a lightning rod for controversy, which we'll discuss shortly. At the time it was announced, Benioff and Weiss were riding high on the success of Game of Thrones, which had just begun airing its seventh season. It probably seemed like a no-brainer to commission another serial from the guys who had given HBO the most popular, culture-saturating series in its history (which is saying something), but things started to go wrong in 2018.

In February of that year, it was announced that the duo had been hired to field a trilogy of Star Wars films, which would have been the first movies in the franchise to debut after the completion of the Skywalker Saga, which wrapped up with the recent Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker. The fact that they were undertaking this gargantuan task while also attempting to deliver a satisfying eighth and final season of Thrones apparently set off some alarm bells at HBO, as the project was immediately moved to the back burner, where it had remained ever since.

It may very well be for the best that the series is officially dead in the water; while it sported an intriguing premise and may have made for a fascinating and provocative story, the controversy surrounding it was in part due to the conception that Benioff and Weiss might not have been the right guys to tell it.