The Dresden Files might be getting a new adaptation

It appears that there's an effort to bring the adventures of Harry Dresden back to the small screen. Word of the adaptation comes from a fascinating profile of Dresden Files author Jim Butcher in The New York Times that marks the 25th anniversary of the series.

Butcher published the first installment of his urban fantasy series, Stormfront, in April 2000, introducing readers to the Chicago-based professional wizard who's called in by the Chicago Police Department to help them solve a gruesome murder that seems to have been enacted with some black magic. In the years since, Butcher has turned out 17 installments, following Dresden as he tangles with all sorts of supernatural creatures and magicians, such as werewolves, vampires, fae, demons, necromancers, and more, accompanied by his friends, including a talking skull named Bob.

I dipped into the series while I was in college and enjoyed the first handful of books. They're quick and entertaining novels in the mold of your police procedurals: I found them to be a bit formulaic, but you stick with them for the longer-term growth of the characters.

The profile takes a high-level view of Butcher's career: he started writing the series as a graduate student at the University of Oklahoma, and had turned a draft of the book in for a writing class, and was encouraged by his teacher to bring in "the rest of it." He ended up writing up an outline for an entire 20 book series, which has largely guided the series ever since. (Butcher has said that the series will run for 25 books, which will be capped off with an "double-length apocalyptic trilogy.")

The profile also goes into Butcher's personal life, detailing his struggles with depression and a suicide attempt after his 2010 novel, Changes. He noted that he had decided to open up about his health issues after meeting a fan who had gone through their own crises.

It's been a couple of years since a new book has hit stores; the last installment, Battle Ground, came out in September 2020, and the next, Twelve Months, is slated for a January 2026 release, and in this article, he notes that it's the first time that he's made a major departure from the outline that he wrote three decades ago, and in which "Dresden takes an entire year to come to grips with the emotional pain he’s endured over the course of the series."

Another interesting piece of news in the profile is that Butcher has been working towards a new TV adaptation of the series. The project hasn't been announced, but if it happens, it'll adapt three of the novels, focusing on Harry's fight against a group of vampires who turned his girlfriend, journalist Susan Rodriguez, into one of their kind. I haven't read the books in years, but skimming summaries, it sounds like they could be set around the third installment of the series, Grave Peril. In the profile, Butcher notes that he's hoping to do some of the writing on the series, and that there are "serious enough talks happening that I’ve had to share my tax I.D. number and so on.”

It's entirely possible that an adaptation won't progress: plenty of books are optioned and set into preproduction only to languish. But while the streaming world has cooled a bit from its heights in the late 2010s, there's still an appetite for new shows. The Dresden Files could also have an advantage here because it's nominally set in the present world in a real place: it strikes me as something that a studio wouldn't have to shell out Wheel of Time or Game of Thrones money to produce.

This wouldn't be the first time the series has been adapted: in 2007, the SCI FI Channel launched its take on the series starring Paul Blackthorne as the titular character. Created by Robert Hewitt Wolfe and Hans Beimler, the show loosely adapted the first couple of books to varying degrees, and ran for only 12 episodes before it was canceled. You can stream it for free on a handful of streaming services, including Tubi, Prime Video, and Roku.

I remember enjoying the 2007 adaptation for what it was, and it'll be interesting to see what it ends up looking like if it happens. The books would lend themselves well to a TV adaptation, but even if we don't get one, there's still plenty of installments to dig into in the meantime.