‘Dungeon Crawler Carl’ TV Show Finds Its Showrunners: Everything We Know About the Peacock Adaptation

The Dungeon Crawler Carl TV show has taken another significant step toward bringing Carl, Princess Donut and the insanity of Dungeon Crawler World to life. Chris Yost and Eric Heisserer have been named co-showrunners of Peacock’s live-action adaptation of Matt Dinniman‘s bestselling LitRPG series. Yost had already been attached as writer and executive producer, but Heisserer’s arrival adds another major science fiction name to the creative team behind the straight-to-series project.

And their combined credits suggest Peacock isn’t exactly treating Dungeon Crawler Carl as your average guy-and-his-talking-cat television series. Yost has written on The Mandalorian and other Star Wars projects and worked on Marvel’s Thor films, while Heisserer earned an Oscar nomination for adapting Arrival, created and served as showrunner on Netflix’s Shadow and Bone and wrote the script for Bird Box.

Matt Dinniman wants the TV series to understand what makes DCC work

Yost comes to the project with great familiarity to it, having been a fan of the books and even a subscriber to Dinniman’s Patreon. What significant about this in terms of the television version is that it fulfills one of the author’s requrements.

MATT DINNIMAN: “One of the first things I did when we started talking about who would we give the rights to sell the show is I wanted to make certain that anybody working on the adaptation was someone who had read it and I talked to and they understood it.”

That’s not to say he’s expecting a page-for-page adaptation.

MATT DINNIMAN: “Each book alone would be multiple seasons if we did everything. Some things will have to go. Some things will have to change. The most untouchable element, I think, is the tone. I don’t want it to turn into some slapstick comedy because if that happens, then we know we’ve failed.”

That may be the biggest challenge facing Yost and Heisserer. DCC can be outrageously funny—this is, after all, a series involving a pantsless Coast Guard veteran fighting his way through an alien dungeon alongside his ex-girlfriend’s award-winning Persian cat—but the humor exists alongside horror, violence and an increasingly emotional relationship between Carl and that cat, Princess Donut.

What is the ‘Dungeon Crawler Carl’ TV series about?

The premise begins with most of humanity being wiped out during an alien takeover of Earth. The survivors are forced underground and turned into contestants on Dungeon Crawler World, an intergalactic reality show where they fight monsters, collect loot and attempt to survive increasingly deadly dungeon levels while billions of alien viewers watch. Carl enters the dungeon with Princess Donut, a pampered show cat who is transformed into an intelligent, talking—and extremely opinionated—partner.

The series originated with Dinniman self-publishing DCC material before the books exploded into a publishing and audiobook phenomenon. The franchise has now sold more than 13 million copies, while its success ultimately led Peacock to give the television adaptation a straight-to-series order.

Jeff Hays will still be Princess Donut

So far, the most important casting announcement has involved someone DCC audiobook listeners already know very well: Jeff Hays, who narrates the audiobooks and performs the voices of Carl, Donut and numerous other characters, will provide Princess Donut’s voice for the television series. His casting was announced at San Diego Comic-Con in July.

JEFF HAYS: “The Dungeon Crawler Carl fan community has been demanding this. There’s been threats of riots.”

How Donut will actually appear onscreen remains a little more mysterious, though Hays has said he’s seen footage involving cats being used in motion-capture tests. That, of course, doesn’t necessarily mean Peacock has settled on the final approach. But the biggest casting question remains unanswered: Who will play Carl?

There’s also no announced premiere date yet. But with Yost and Heisserer now running the show, Hays returning as Donut and Peacock having bypassed the pilot stage with its straight-to-series order, Dungeon Crawler Carl has moved considerably closer to answering an even bigger question: Just what is Dungeon Crawler World going to look like when somebody finally turns on the cameras?