His Dark Materials is a YA fantasy drama based on Philip Pullman’s books. It’s about a couple of kids who stumble into alternate worlds and go on adventures.
However, the themes get a bit heavier than usual. In this story, young Lyra and Will are running away from the Magisterium, a tyrannical theocracy that wants to control people by separating their souls from their bodies. They even kill god at the end of this story.
The HBO show digs deep into these themes by spending more time with the adults in the story, including Magisterium bigwig Father MacPhail. “We deliberately introduced Father MacPhail much earlier than the books did, because we wanted to understand his journey,” writer Jack Thorne informed Polygon. “We wanted to understand how someone does this to themselves and does this to their country.”
There are also some of the real-world events we’ve been grappling with over the last few years, including the rise of interest in fascism throughout the world and lawmakers being openly bigoted in some unusual way.
Thorne said, “I’m very scared of where we are, as a world right now. I think we all are a bit scared of where we are as a world,” “The way that we’ve put ourselves in our binary boxes and gone, If you’re not on my team, then you’re on the other team. And the forces that have arisen that have taken advantage of that. You think especially of Trump, and you think of Boris Johnson in my country, and the scary way they found to manipulate news to support their ego-driven agendas. That does live very strongly in [His Dark Materials].”
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