The New Cycle Begins
The recent television work has done something the films never quite managed, which is to put the Sisterhood at the centre. The newest series begins before the first novel, in the years when the plan was being made, and it spends its time on the machinery rather than on the hero. That is a defensible choice and a risky one, and I want to look at both sides of it.
The risk is obvious. The prequel material has already proved, in print, that it can absorb a reader's attention and then leave them with a hole where the surprise used to be. A viewer who has spent hours inside the earlier decades now watches the first novel's opening scenes with the answers already in their hands. The film that did this best in 1984 did it accidentally, and the mistake survived because the images were so good. The new television version is making the choice deliberately, which means it has to find something else to carry the weight.
What it has, I think, is atmosphere and scale, and a cast that plays the politics as quiet competition rather than as shouting. The council scenes are the test. If you can watch people try to destroy each other with nothing but courtesy and a change in seating, you are watching something that understands these books. If you cannot, the series is telling you about institutions you have not been given the terms for.
So what does a new series owe the original books? My answer is three things, and none of them are about budget. First, it owes them the ecology, which is the subject and not the setting. Second, it owes them the politics being real, so that a marriage is a treaty and a vote is a weapon. Third, and hardest, it owes them the right to be puzzling, because the original books were not written to be consumed quickly and any adaptation that wants the audience's loyalty on a weekly schedule is quietly making a different set of books.
This is a fan blog and I will end the thought where I began it: I am more interested in what the new cycle says about the old books than in the new cycle itself. If it sends readers back to Herbert with sharper questions, it has done its job. If it closes the door, it has merely been the latest good version of a story many of us will keep reading anyway.