Long before Game of Thrones, George R.R. Martin worked on a Beauty and the Beast series set in 1980s New York
If you reckon Thrones defines George R.R. Martin, his acclaimed ’80s fantasy series shows how wildly different his work can get — and that gap is intriguing.
Right, so most folk know George R.R. Martin as the bloke who wrote Game of Thrones (or more accurately, the A Song of Ice and Fire books), but he was a telly man long before Westeros ever existed. In fact, back in the late '80s and early '90s, Martin spent most of his working hours bashing out TV scripts, getting increasingly hacked off with just how much the networks wanted everything to shrink — no room for all-out battles, no sprawling casts, not enough cash for any of it. Still, for all his grumbles about budgets and storytelling limits, Martin's stint in television left its mark. One show in particular, CBS’s Beauty and the Beast, remains one of his great off-Westeros creations — and, if you remember the era, it’s pretty wild stuff.
Beauty and the Beast aired on CBS from 25 September 1987 until 4 August 1990.
A Modern Beast in Manhattan
So, what actually was this thing? Beauty and the Beast takes your basic fairy tale template — that old French yarn by Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont — and drags it out of the castle, plonking it straight into the middle of grimy 1980s New York. Linda Hamilton (off The Terminator) plays Catherine Chandler, all stylish lawyer with a posh background, living the Manhattan high life — until, naturally, she gets on the wrong side of some very dodgy blokes and ends up horribly attacked. Enter Vincent (Ron Perlman): a literal lion-man living in a secret community in the tunnels under the city. He rescues Catherine, heals her up, and forms this almost telepathic bond where he can feel whenever she’s in serious trouble — which, considering her new gig at the District Attorney's office, turns out to be pretty handy.
Vincent's look is all prosthetics and fur — fanged teeth, lion muzzle, claws, flattened nose. The legendary Rick Baker whipped up the makeup, and Ron Perlman does this gentle, seductive voice, quite different to anything else he’s done on telly. They steer well clear of the soppy fairy tale idea that love will make Vincent 'normal'. He stays beastly in looks, saintly in behaviour. The romance is there, but the further the show goes, the more it's about Catherine delving into the 'World Below' and less about the Beauty-and-the-Beast courtship tropes. Vincent gets a proper baddie to square off against too: Paracelsus (Tony Jay), a former founder of the tunnels, now their twisted nemesis.
Kindness Over Murk
If you’re hoping for the moral murkiness and endless backstabbing of Game of Thrones, well, you won’t find it here. Martin's New York underworld is all about outcasts making a sort of utopia under the city, caring for each other, and generally doing the right thing. There’s none of the big scheming, no Thrones-style 'everyone’s corrupt' routine. Vincent could, in theory, take over the city, but that's not his vibe; he'd rather live amongst his fellow oddballs with books and candles and the occasional bit of help from above. That, by the way, gave the show a little room to nod at real-world issues like homelessness in New York, which was everywhere in the headlines at the time and, bit depressingly, still hasn’t exactly gone away.
Martin himself made it clear in conversation with The Hollywood Reporter that, despite some viewers trying to draw a line from Beauty and the Beast to Thrones, he doesn’t see it:
They are very different shows. I think the experience I gained while working on Beauty and the Beast served me in good stead when I did later work, including Game of Thrones. But I don’t think there’s any direct connection between the two, no.
Training Ground for TV Bigshots
Martin had some serious company in that writers’ room. Alex Gansa and Howard Gordon — both names you’ll know from 24 — cut their teeth on Beauty and the Beast before moving on to co-create Homeland (and pocketing an Emmy in the process). It was clearly a bit of a proving ground for people who’d go on to shape some of the next decades’ best telly.
Now, for all its inventiveness, the show did not go out on its own terms. Linda Hamilton left early in series three to start a family (fair cop), so her character got killed off and the heart well and truly went out of the thing. Ratings collapsed. Martin reckoned, with Hamilton on board, they could have kept it up for five seasons at least, but after considering all sorts — recasting Catherine, moving her away, even shipping her to Australia — they decided death was the only dramatically satisfying option. Here’s how Martin explained it:
'I’m sorry. I said I’d love you for all time, but now I have a good job opportunity in Melbourne.' So that would not have worked. Our choice was really between recasting and death, and we chose death because that was inherently more dramatic.
New lead Jo Anderson as Diana Bennett stepped in, but let’s be honest, viewers weren’t having it. As Martin quipped in one interview, it’s a bit like selling people on Romeo and Juliet for two years, then replacing Juliet with Harriet in season three:
Juliet? Forget Juliet. It’s Romeo and Harriet. Here’s a different love story for the ages!
In the odd way of things, the early cancellation may have been lucky for readers: had the series rolled on, Martin might never have gone back to finish his novels, and the world of Thrones might never have been built at all.