His Dark Materials

Puchback from religious groups helped derail plans to bring Philip Pullman's trilogy of fantasy novels - collectively titled "His Dark Materials" - to the big screen. Only the first novel - originally titled "Northern Lights,: but retitled "The Golden Compass" for the Aerican book market and for the 2007 Hollywood film adaptation - made it to cineplexes.

Now HBO has stepped up to correct that mistake, bringing the fantasy epic to the small screen as a continuing series. Season One, which commences Monday, Nov. 4,, is slated for eight episodes, and a second eight-episode season has already been green lit.

The series takes place in a not-quite-familair world similar to - but crucially different from - our own. In this fantasy version of the cosmos, human beings and "daemons" - the physical manifestations of souls, which take the shape of animals - are intimately, vitally linked, such that to kill a soul is also to kill the person to whom it is attached, and vice-versa. The time seems to be now, and yet airships fill the skies, people dress in '40s-era finery, and there ate stark social divisions keeping people of different classes in their place.

The series centers around young heroine Lyra Belacqua (Dafne Keen, "Logan"), an energetic and impulsive twelve-year-old. Years ago, as an infant, Lyra was brought to Jordan College at Oxford by her uncle, Lord Asriel (James McAvoy of the "X Men" movies). The infant's arrival at the college was marked by a great natural disturbance - a flood, not of Biblical proportions, but memorable all the same. Lord Asriel leaves the child with the college's Dr. Carne (Clarke Peters, "The Wire"), invoking "scholastic sanctuary" as he does so to guarantee her safety.

This being fantasy, "scholastic sanctuary" is (usually) enough to protect the college against the predations of a theistic ruling force called The Magisterium - a thinly-diguised version of the Catholic church, wherein ruthless power players position themselves over ordinary people and prey on their children. The most obvious effect of this is the disappearance of children from communities across the country, abductions attributed to shadowy "gobblers." But what do these gobblers want with children like Billy Costa (Tyler Howitt), the younger brother of the courageous young Tony Costa (Daniel Frogson) and son of fierce, force-of-nature Ma Costa (Anne-Marie Duff )? The Costas belong to a nomadic, river-faring peop[le called the Gyptians; being essentially rootless, the Gyptians have no qualms about following the gobblers to London... where, coincidentally, Lyra's protectors at the college have dispatched her, in the care of the mysterious Mrs. Coulter (Ruth Wilson, "The Affair"), a charming, poised, wealthy, and extremely dangerous woman who has her own plans for the young protagonist.

The story threads are numerous: Lord Asriel is on a dangerous quest to unravel the secrets of a mysterious substance called "dust" (a mystical element that has even the great Magisterium spooked), while Mrs. Coulter's maneuverings place her at the crux of an epic battle between the forces of good and evil; she embodies the show's opposing forces, pulled equally toward protecting and corrupting Lyra. Some of those forces are mundane - killers, political leaders, informers, rebels - and some are spectral. The twists are plentiful; the stakes, while sometimes muddy (at least in the early epodes) feel truly cosmic.

The four episodes provided for critical review take the story midway through the first novel, just far enough along in the complex story to introduce a free-spirited aeronaut called Lee Scoresby (Lin-Manuel Miranda). The series' tone shifts considerably with Scoresby's entree; suddenly, a slightly scattershot story that has felt uncertain about genre and somewhat slow in pace quickens, sharpens, brightens, and - despite still too many elements that feel derivative of earlier works such as the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy or "A Wrinkle in Time" - comes into its own.

Armored polar bears; Northerly witches who might prove to be allies; villainous hit man types like Lord Boreal (Ariyon Bakare); and, most notably, animistic (and animal) manifestations of the human soul make this high-concept action-adventure series more than another televised confection. Like the books, the series touches upon arcane physics and even more arcane religious mysticism (not the least of which is Donne's monumental poem "Paradise Lost"), while high production values gives each segment a cinematic gloss. In short, "His Dark Materials" has all the ingredients for the first worthy successor to the late, lamented "Game of Thrones." As with that other epic, you'll be teased, worried, and riveted from the first.

"His Dark Materials" premieres Nov. 4 on HBO.