It’s 2026 and Baldur’s Gate 3 is getting a TV show. If you played BG3, you already have opinions about this. Strong ones.
I’ll be honest. When the announcement dropped in February, I was equal parts excited and nervous. And after spending some time with everything we know so far, I’m still sitting somewhere between “this could be incredible” and “oh no.”
Let me break it all down.
So, What’s Actually Happening?
Deadline broke the news on February 5, 2026: HBO is developing a live-action Baldur’s Gate TV series. The showrunner is Craig Mazin, the guy behind Chernobyl and The Last of Us. He’s co-producing alongside Hasbro Entertainment, which owns the Dungeons & Dragons IP through Wizards of the Coast.
The show is titled simply “Baldur’s Gate” (not Baldur’s Gate 3), and it won’t retell the game’s story. It picks up immediately after BG3’s events, with both familiar companions and new characters. Think of it as a sequel series, not a direct adaptation.
No cast. No script. No filming dates. The whole thing is extremely early. Mazin first has to finish The Last of Us Season 3. Realistically, we’re looking at a 2028 premiere at the absolute earliest. More likely 2029.
Why Mazin? And Is That Actually Good News?
Here’s the thing most people don’t know about Craig Mazin: he’s a massive BG3 fan. Not casually. The man has logged nearly 1,000 hours in the game. He completed it on Honor Mode, the notoriously brutal difficulty setting that wipes your save on death. He’s been a weekly Dungeon Master for 15 years.
HBO’s CEO Casey Bloys confirmed that Baldur’s Gate was Mazin’s idea, not the studio’s. He brought it to them. That’s a meaningful detail. This isn’t a producer chasing a hot IP. This is someone who actually wants to tell these stories.
And Chernobyl was genuinely one of the best TV miniseries in recent memory. The Last of Us Season 1 was excellent.
That said, The Last of Us Season 2 got a 37% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes. So the “Mazin can do no wrong” argument has some cracks in it.
Wait, What About Larian?
Yeah. This is where it gets spicy.
Larian Studios, the team that actually built Baldur’s Gate 3, has no formal involvement in the show. Zero. Hasbro owns the IP, so legally they can do whatever they want with it. But the optics are… not great.
Compare that to The Last of Us, where Neil Druckmann co-ran the show with Mazin. Or Fallout, where Todd Howard had a producer credit. BG3’s adaptation has neither Swen Vincke nor any of Larian’s writers in any official capacity.
Larian’s internal reaction was split right down the middle. CEO Swen Vincke was measured about it. He confirmed that Mazin reached out to visit the studio and said, “From the conversation we had, I think he truly is a big fan, which gives me hope.” He also pointed out that BG3’s endings were designed as “narrative soil for new adventures,” so the sequel approach at least makes sense on paper.
Michael Douse, Larian’s publishing director, took the opposite approach. His first public reaction was “Imma bout to crash out on main.” He followed that with pointed posts defending BG3’s writers as the best storytellers in the space, and spent the rest of the day reposting memes and fan criticism. He was not subtle about how he felt.
Neil Newbon, the voice actor behind Astarion and a BAFTA winner for the role, was more chill: “Let them cook, man.” He praised Mazin’s Chernobyl work and noted that different mediums require different things. He also mentioned Mazin has indicated interest in reaching out to BG3’s voice cast, similar to how he brought back Merle Dandridge for TLOU.
The Big Problem Nobody Can Solve
Here’s the thing that keeps me up at night about this show: Baldur’s Gate 3 has over 17,000 different ending variations.
Does Astarion ascend as a vampire lord or stay a spawn? Does Karlach die, survive, or burn her way into the hells? Does Gale become a god? Every player’s BG3 experience is different. That’s literally the point of the game. BG3’s lead writer once said that testing a single character’s full story arc required 18 separate playthroughs.
For a TV show to exist, someone has to pick one version of events. And the moment they do that, they’re telling millions of players that their story wasn’t the “real” one.
This is genuinely the hardest adaptation problem in gaming right now. The Last of Us adapted a linear story. Joel and Ellie’s journey was the same for everyone who played it. Fallout on Amazon sidesteps this entirely by setting the show in a different part of the country, with mostly new characters.
The Baldur’s Gate show is doing neither. It’s directly continuing the story of characters whose fates are different in every player’s save file. Someone’s Karlach is alive. Someone else’s Karlach is dead. Both players are going to watch this show.
Mazin’s response to this problem has essentially been: we’ll pick one outcome and build from there, while keeping returning companions from being fully central to the new story. The show will focus on new low-level heroes, with the old companions as powerful background figures who “meddle” in their journey. Some as allies, some as villains.
It’s a decent solution. It doesn’t fully solve the problem. But it might be the best available option.
What Do We Actually Know About the Story?
Not much, because nothing has been written yet. What we have from the official announcement:
- Set immediately after BG3’s events, in the city of Baldur’s Gate and the Forgotten Realms
- New protagonists start as low-level adventurers and grow in classic D&D fashion
- Familiar companions return as “incredibly powerful” figures, playing both heroic and villainous roles
- The show is designed as an ongoing series, not a limited run
- Chris Perkins, the former Head of Story at Wizards of the Coast and now at Critical Role, is attached as a lore consultant
That last one is genuinely interesting. Perkins knows D&D canon better than almost anyone, and his involvement suggests the show will at least take the lore seriously.
How Are Fans Reacting?
Mostly badly. Which, honestly, is fair.
The original announcement post on r/BaldursGate3 got 4,500+ upvotes within a day. The most upvoted comment was something along the lines of “this is going to make Game of Thrones Season 8 look good.” A meme casting Sydney Sweeney, iShowSpeed, Kermit the Frog, and Danny DeVito as the companion group hit 5,300 upvotes in three hours. The internet was not kind.
The core fan objections are real and worth taking seriously:
The canonization problem is the biggest one, as we talked about above. Then there’s Larian’s absence. Then there’s anxiety about who gets cast as Astarion, Shadowheart, and everyone else when those characters are so tied to specific voice performances.
That said, some fans are keeping an open mind. The argument from the “let’s see” camp is basically: Mazin isn’t some suit who bought an IP. He’s someone who clearly loves this world and has the track record to make prestige TV.
I’m personally somewhere in between. The casting decisions will tell us a lot. The first trailer will tell us more. Right now, we’re just in the hype-anxiety phase that every adaptation goes through.
One More Thing Worth Knowing
The Baldur’s Gate show doesn’t exist alone. There’s also a Netflix series called The Forgotten Realms in development, with Stranger Things producer Shawn Levy attached. It’s also set in D&D’s Forgotten Realms universe, though it’s a separate project covering different ground.
Hasbro has openly said these two shows are designed to co-exist, treating the Forgotten Realms the same way Marvel treats the MCU. A big world with room for multiple simultaneous stories.
So if you’re a D&D fan, the next three or four years are going to be very, very interesting.
Should You Be Excited or Worried?
Honestly? A bit of both.
The person running this show genuinely loves the source material, has the skills to make prestige TV, and is working with a network that’s had more hits than misses with this kind of thing. Those are real positives.
But Baldur’s Gate 3 is one of the hardest games ever made to adapt, specifically because its greatness comes from the fact that your story is yours. The second the show picks its canon, something gets lost.
What I’ll say is this: the show isn’t coming for a while. Sit with the original game in the meantime. Maybe replay it. Pick an Origin character you haven’t tried. Do a Dark Urge run if you haven’t. Let Larian’s version of the story exist on its own terms for a little longer before TV gets its hands on it.
And when the first cast announcement drops, I’ll be here to obsess over it with you.
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