Shadow and Bone showrunner Eric Heisserer talks about adapting the Shadow and Bone trilogy and Crooked Kingdom, and the big changes to the ending.
Stepping up to adapt a beloved YA series with passionate fans is no easy task. We’ve seen the rise and fall of the Twilights, Hunger Games, and Shadowhunters of the world. Up to bat now is Leigh Bardugo’s bestselling Grishaverse books, a fantasy series that takes place in a world of elemental summoners and impressive thieves. They’ve been beloved for the better part of the last decade, but it was only with 2021’s Netflix adaptation Shadow and Bone that they made it to the screen.
Right away, showrunner Eric Heisserer made some bold choices — pulling in characters who don’t canonically get introduced till after the main series? Making Alina half-Shu? Adjusting the core romantic relationships? But if the first season’s reception was any indication, those choices were the right ones — fans ate it up.
With the second season out, the writers behind Shadow and Bone have continued to make daring decisions, leaning on the books as a launching pad instead of a foundation. Whether or not these changes work might depend on how accurate you like your page-to-screen adaptations. But one thing’s for sure: Heisserer and his team aren’t too concerned about being totally faithful, so long as they capture the spirit of the story.
Polygon spoke to Heisserer about the challenges of adapting the beloved books into eight episodes, changing character arcs, and the plotline he was sad didn’t make it into the final cut.
[Ed. note: This post contains spoilers for season 2 of Shadow and Bone.]
Polygon: You covered so much ground in only eight episodes this season — Siege and Storm, Ruin and Rising, plus aspects of the Crows duology and more. Why did it make sense to condense so much into this season?
Eric Heisserer: It was less about looking to condense things. It was more about making sure that with all the characters that we had, and all the mouths we were looking to feed, we gave them a full meal. We looked for the most active moments and scenes for these characters that helped push the story forward where their choices made a difference. And this is really what we came up with. We started with that idea of, How can we make sure that each of these people feel like they’re contributing to the story, and aren’t just sort of set by the wayside? What we wound up with was sort of an interesting collection of sequences. We then had to do a lot of heavy lifting to make sure that (a) they work together and (b) that if we pulled from future books, that we knew we could replace it with something just as compelling that wouldn’t disturb any of the story around that, should we have the privilege to get to it.
Was there a scene from the books that you absolutely knew you had to keep?
There were a lot of scenes that we knew that we had to keep from multiple books that we pulled from. It was only a matter of, Can we keep it and also then maybe come back to other things that we didn’t have time for? We wanted to preserve a number of scenes between Alina and Mal, Alina and Nikolai. Sturmhond interacting with a number of people, including — this isn’t necessarily from the book, but to have him interacting with the Crows would end up being vital to the way that this season’s story played out, and help connect the dots about stuff that happened in season 1.
Was there a particular arc or relationship that you wish there had been more time to explore?
Yes, this is a great question! We had an important side story that featured Feydor and Ivan from season 1 that we had written into season 2, and leaned on pretty heavily. We were excited to explore that relationship dynamic more, as two lovers who found each other on either side of this war between Alina and Kirigan. And we’d gotten far enough into it that we had Julian [Kostov] there for early press during preproduction. We were hoping to bring Simon [Sears] in. Although he had a feature film commitment, we were looking to try and find a way around that schedule. Then Julian caught COVID during production, at a time that made it impossible for us to find a way to keep them in the season. That was heartbreaking for both me and Daegan [Fryklind].
It also meant a lot of rewriting on the fly. We were like, Oh, what are we gonna do about this whole storyline now? And so what we’re hoping to do is show how both of these characters survived not only the end of season 1, but through season 2, and how they can reunite with other characters if we have a chance to do so moving forward.
