According to The Hollywood Reporter, Game Of Thrones showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss are working on another big HBO drama that might fill the hole that their dragon show will soon be leaving. Titled Confederate, the series takes place in an alternate reality in which the southern states did secede from the Union and America is now on the brink of its third Civil War. In this new reality, “slavery remains legal and has evolved into a modern institution,” which is a fun plot point for our current political climate, and the series will follow a group of characters on both sides of the “Mason-Dixon Demilitarized Zone” including “freedom fighters, slave hunters, politicians, abolitionists, journalists, the executives of a slave-holding conglomerate, and the families of people in their thrall.”
Benioff and Weiss are writing the project and will once again act as showrunners, and in a statement they say that they’ve been discussing Confederate for years and originally intended for it to be a feature film, but their work on Game Of Thrones apparently convinced them that HBO is the place to be. Production on Confederate won’t begin until Game Of Thrones is completely done, which won’t happen until at least 2018, so the new show is probably pretty far off.