"The Man in the High Castle" is one of the most acclaimed new shows of the moment, but its road to Amazon took eight long years.
The 1962 Philip K. Dick novel certainly had interested parties who considered producing it, but they all seemed to fall out. In depicting a world in which the Nazis won World War II, the TV series would be both expensive to produce and full of symbols (like swastikas) that may not be easy for an audience to swallow (as the ads for the Amazon show are already proving).
At one point, it looked like a series would never happen.
"It was just a really impossible sell,"Philip K. Dick's daughter Isa Hackett recently told Business Insider. "We were so sad because our team had always been so devoted to this idea of doing this particular adaptation in this form. We sort of acknowledged that we’re all going to have to go on our way, and it was sad."
About a month later, all that would change.
Here's the eight-year path "The Man in the High Castle" took from book to TV show:
SEE ALSO: Amazon's 'Man in the High Castle' TV series has made Philip K. Dick's original book a bestseller
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2006: "Blade Runner" director Ridley Scott signs on as executive producer
Ridley Scott directed 1982's "Blade Runner," starring Harrison Ford. He had since created the production company Scott Free Productions. Hackett believed Scott could really make "The Man in the High Castle" TV series great.
“'Blade Runner' was Ridley, which was of course probably the most important cinematic adaptation of my dad’s work. It's an acknowledged classic," she said. "So I thought that would be the place to start with, right? To go and see whether they were interested in doing this for television."
And indeed they were: Scott Free Productions is responsible for the Amazon series all these years later.
2010: BBC comes aboard
In 2010, the public would first hear of a TV series adaptation of "The Man in the High Castle." BBC ordered a miniseries take on the book.
"The idea was to adapt the full novel in four hours," Hackett remembered. She then said "a lot happened along the way."
That included the death of their first writer, Frank Deasy. "It was so sad and tragic," Hackett said.
Howard Brenton, a playwright and writer on TV series "MI5," then came on to the project and wrote the first two hours.
But BBC passed on the series and the team had to look for a new home for the series.
2013: Syfy starts from scratch
It would take a few years, but "The Man in the High Castle" would find its next home across the pond at science-fiction channel Syfy. But it wanted to tear the show down and build again from the ground up.
But it would also help to bring in a key team member, writer and producer Frank Spotnitz, who was a major voice on "The X-Files."
"They wanted to bring in a US writer, and that’s when we brought Frank in," Hackett said. "So he adapted the first two hours. We started from scratch."
In the end, though, Syfy would ultimately pass on the project.
"So we were sort of at the end there with having gone out to literally every network and cabler that existed at that point in time and tried to set it up and nobody wanted it," she continued.
"Let me back up. It’s not that they didn’t want it, it’s that they felt that they couldn’t do it, and it was really about a combination of things, which was the cost of it — because you can imagine the cost of creating these worlds, and really three distinct worlds within the story — and the subject matter, which is very dark."
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