BBC

The BBC has announced that it plans to adapt author Phillip Pullman’s epic fantasy trilogy His Dark Materials for television. (Woooo!)

The critically acclaimed novels – The Golden Compass (published as Northern Lights in the UK), The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass – have been published in more than 40 languages and sold over 17 million copies worldwide.

If you’re a fan of especially elaborate period dramas – or possibly just had to take a lot of English classes in college – you’re going to be pretty excited about this news.

The BBC is set to release a new adaptation of Leo Tolstoy’s classic novel War and Peace, and the event series is being described as “one of the most ambitious” ever produced for the corporation.

I’m officially home from a wonderful long weekend at San Diego Comic Con, also known as nerd nirvana. I saw a lot of cool stuff and geeked out about a lot of things, so bear with me as I recap a few of them.

Probably the best thing I saw at Comic Con this past weekend was a panel featuring several members of the Sherlock cast and crew, including creator Steven Moffat, executive producer Sue Vertue and star Rupert Graves.

The group chatted and took questions from fans for roughly an hour, touching on wide ranging topics from the show’s upcoming Victorian special episode to how to write comedy to what makes Sherlock so popular. It was a very enlightening and entertaining panel, just from a topical sense – and that’s before they dropped the first new Sherlock footage we’ve seen in the better part of two years.

Heads up for those who love dramatic World War I stories! Period drama The Crimson Field finally comes to America this week on PBS stations nationwide.

The six-part series tells the story of World War I’s frontline medics – their hopes, fears, triumphs and tragedies. In a tented field hospital on the coast of France, a team of doctors, nurses and women volunteers works together to heal the bodies and souls of men wounded in the trenches. The hospital is a frontier: between the battlefield and home front, but also between the old rules, hierarchies and a new way of thinking.

Game of Thrones Oona Chaplin, MI-5’s Hermoine Morris and Scott & Bailey’s Suranne Jones star as volunteer nurses who must deal daily with injuries, casualties and death. (In some ways it’s a bit like Call the Midwife but set during the Great War.) These women arrived in France in 1915, as part of the Voluntary Aid Detachments (or VADs), who were the first volunteers at the field hospitals there.

Rejoice, fellow book fans: The first trailer for period fantasy drama Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell has arrived!

The BBC’s seven-part series will adapt the massively popular book of the same name by Susanna Clarke, which stars Bertie Carvell and Eddie Marsan as two nineteenth-century men in an alternate history where magic is widely acknowledged but rarely practiced. The cast also includes Charlotte Riley, Alice Engle, Marco Warren, Samuel West and more.

The BBC has released a new trailer for their upcoming remake of classic period drama Poldark and it’s jam-packed full of dramatic music, war flashbacks, gorgeous scenery, romantic tension and more.

Happily, this clip is 100% different from the teaser trailer that PBS and Masterpiece dropped last month – more new footage for us! Another bonus, the BBC clip focuses on who the characters are and giving us a little explanation of what’s going on, so this is actually great for those viewers who may not now anything about the first Poldark but are curious about this one, since it’s such event programming for both the BBC and PBS.

This may seem surprising news to American fans, who haven't even seen Season 3 yet, but popular romantic drama Last Tango in Halifax has already been given the green light for a fourth season! The BBC officially announced the renewal via their Twitter account, following the conclusion of the show's third season run in the UK.

The series stars Sir Derek Jacobi and Anne Reid as an older couple who found a second chance at love with one another thanks to the power of social media, fifty years after they first met. Sarah Lancashire and Nicola Walker play Alan and Celia's grown children, who lead rather drama-filled lives of their own.

The BBC has released the first trailer for its upcoming adaptation of J.K. Rowling'sThe Casual Vacancy, the Harry Potter author's first attempt at a novel for adults following the conclusion of her blockbuster teen wizard series. The drama stars a bevy of recognizable British faces, including Potter film franchise alum Michael Gambon alongside Line of Duty’s Keeley Hawes, The Hollow Crown’s Rory Kinnear, Appropriate Adult’s Monica Dolan, Miss Marple’s Julia McKenzie and more.

It’s official: It’s almost time for a new season of Call the Midwife! Everyone’s favorite tear-jerking period drama is headed back to our screens for a fourth season (it’s already been renewed for a fifth, by the way) and the BBC has finally released the first trailer the show’s return. It is, as you might expect, a rather potent mixture of tears, laughter, drama and a proposal for one of our favorite characters.

This season will mark the first without original Call the Midwife star Jessica Raines, but as we saw in the recent holiday special, while Nurse Jenny Lee is certainly missed, the show is more than capable of carrying on merrily (or sniffle-y or whatever you want to call it) along without her. In her absence, a few new faces will be joining the crew at Nonnatus House – Fresh Meat’s Charlotte Ritchie and Lark Rise to Candleford’s Linda Bassett, who will play nurses Barbara Gilbert and Phyllis Crane, respectively.

Mystery series Death in Paradise was faced with an unenviable task at the beginning of its third season – how do you reinvent a show whose premise is based on a rather grumpy detective sent to investigate murder in a tropical paradise when the actor who plays said detective has decided to leave the show?

As Season 3 began, that’s exactly what happened. Despite the show’s popularity, star Ben Miller, who played DI Richard Poole, decided he wanted to try other things, and was subsequently written out of the show. He was replaced by Kris Marshall, an actor whom many Americans had probably only known as Colin from popular Christmas rom-com Love Actually until that point. (He’s the guy that travels to Wisconsin in hopes of finding an American girlfriend.)