10 TV Shows That So Badly Wanted To Be Game Of Thrones
9. Beowulf: Return To The Shieldlands
TV executives looking for their own Game Of Thrones eventually realised that they didn't even need to find another writer of doorstop fantasy tomes like George R.R. Martin and shell out for the screen rights. They could just dip for free into the public domain instead.
In fact, if you want big beardy dragon-fighting warriors then you can go all the way back to the earliest text ever written in English and find them right there.
Sure, Beowulf didn't have the most amazing screen pedigree, with The 13th Warrior proving a notorious box office bomb and that version with a CGI Ray Winstone's head on a far buffer body just being, well, as off-putting as that sounds. But maybe ITV would be the ones to finally crack it and give British TV its own homegrown Game Of Thrones.
Return To The Shieldlands eschews the solo monster fighting for which the mythical Beowulf was known to instead throw the character into a much more Westeros-style political power struggle in a grimy, violent Dark Ages world.
Like See, it also ensured people would make the link with the HBO blockbuster by bringing along a member of the Thrones cast, in this case Walder Frey himself, David Bradley.
The relatively low budget Return To The Shieldlands suffered in comparison with the glossy HBO show, though, with its perma-scowling hero lacking any of the richness of the Thrones ensemble. Producers announced that it would not be picked up for a second season before the first had even finished airing.