Starz’s hit drama series “Outlander” has hewed pretty closely to Diana Gabaldon’s ongoing series of novels, leaving the show no obvious path forward beyond the eighth book, but showrunner Ronald D. Moore says there are no plans to stray from the source material yet.
Famously, HBO’s “Game of Thrones,” itself based on a popular book series, outpaced its author George R. R. Martin, leaving showrunner David Benioff and D.B. Weiss no choice but to forge their own storylines. But Moore says his show doesn’t face the same problem.
“I cannot imagine a scenario where we catch up with Diana Gabaldon,” he told reporters at the Television Critics Association press tour on Friday. “She will tell us what the end of the story is.”
“If Starz and Sony will have us, we will absolutely keep making the show,” added executive producer Maril Davis.
The show has so far kept a pace of one book per season, with this September’s Season 3 encompassing the entirety Gabaldon’s third entry in the series, “Voyager.” The book is the longest installment in the series, and the show earned a two-season renewal early last year, but Moore said the executive producer resisted the temptation to stretch the story out more.
“We didn’t go too far down that road,” he said. “We did talk about that before we approached the season, because just in terms of page counts, it’s the biggest of the books. So you sort of automatically wonder if this is too much for one season. … [But] when you really boil it down to what the story was and the character relationships, we realized we could tell this in just one season.”