Starz's New Romantasy Series Is the Perfect 'Outlander' Replacement
Lacy Baugher Milas is an entertainment and culture writer whose bylines have appeared in Paste Magazine, The A.V. Club, Den of Geek, Jezebel, Digital Spy, Telly Visions, and more. A lover of Time Lords, fantasy stories, period dramas, and tumultuous 90s rock bands, you can find her on social media pretty much everywhere as @LacyMB.
After eight blockbuster seasons, the popular historical romance series Outlander wrapped up its run earlier this year with a heart-wrenching, if somewhat divisive, finale. But no matter how you felt about the show’s final season, the love story of Jamie (Sam Heughan) and Claire Fraser (Caitríona Balfe) was a defining part of Starz's network identity for the better part of a decade, so it makes sense that they’re looking for something to fill that particular void as soon as possible.
Thankfully, we haven’t been kicked out of the world of Outlander entirely. Prequel series Outlander: Blood of My Blood offers an equally timey-wimey origin story for both Jamie and Claire's parents and spins intriguing new bits of franchise lore for longtime fans to enjoy. (Spoiler alert: It’s excellent.) But one Scottish-set love story is apparently not enough for Starz, which already has plans in motion for its next big historical romance hit.
Starz Will Adapt Lauren Palphreyman’s ‘The Wolf King’
The recent romantasy boom in the world of publishing has led many networks to snap up the rights to some of the genre’s most popular titles. Prime Video is working on a Fourth Wing series. Hulu’s developing an adaptation of The Poison Daughter. But Starz’s decision to bring Lauren Palphreyman’s The Wolf King to the screen feels like a perfect match between streamer and subject matter. Like Outlander before it, The Wolf King has a little bit of everything romance and fantasy fans might want: A feisty heroine. A pair of star-crossed lovers, A brewing brutal political conflict. Incredibly rich atmosphere and beautiful scenery. (Get ready for a lot of gorgeous shots of the Scottish Highlands, is all I’m saying.) Steamy sex. Also, there are werewolves. (Yes, really!)
But Outlander also always had a slightly magical vibe—especially in later seasons when Claire began to manifest a supernatural healing ability that caused her hair to turn white. The show was never all that clear when it came to nailing down what this power actually was, but it definitely came in handy (a.k.a. it saved Jamie’s life) more than once.
What Is ‘The Wolf King’ About?
A massive hit on BookTok and among romantasy fans, The Wolf King follows the story of Aurora, a princess who is betrothed to a cruel man in the hopes of shoring up one of her father’s political alliances. The night before their arranged marriage is to take place, the wedding couple is gifted the dubious “entertainment” of watching captured werewolves fight to the death for sport. But when Aurora saves a young wolf named Ryan from certain death after he is chosen to face a vicious alpha in the ring, she unknowingly changes her fate forever.
Her decision catches the attention of Callum, the alpha slated to fight Ryan, and when he escapes the castle later that evening, he kidnaps Aurora and takes her to the lands north of the border, where wolf clans are beginning to get organized into something that feels an awful lot like an army. As Aurora finds herself caught in the middle of a supernatural war, she must fight her growing attraction to both the alpha who insists he wants to help her earn her freedom and a cunning, morally gray wolf named Blake whose motivations are a whole lot murkier.
Collider Exclusive · 8 Questions · 2 Minutes Which Iconic Romance Is Your Favorite? Harry & Sally · Love & Basketball · Heated Rivalry · Titanic
Four great love stories, and four completely different ideas of what love actually is. One is a friendship that took twelve years to admit itself. One is two people who refuse to stop competing. One happens entirely behind closed doors. And one lasts five days and never stops mattering. Eight questions decide which one is really yours.
🍂Harry & Sally(1989)
🏀Love & Basketball(2000)
🏒Heated Rivalry(HBO Max)
🚢Titanic(1997)
01
How does your love story start? The first scene tells you what kind of story this is going to be.
02
What do the two of you keep arguing about? Every great romance has one fight it has over and over.
03
How do you show somebody that you love them? Grand gestures are easy to write. This is the harder question.
04
What is actually standing in the way? There is always something. Which something tells you the genre.
05
Which romantic moment gets you every single time? Be honest. There is one that works on you and you know which.
06
What would you actually risk for the right person? Every romance asks this. Most people find out far too late.
07
Where are the two of you in ten years? Some love stories are about the meeting. Some are about the staying.
08
Which of these sounds most like something you would say? Eight questions in, this is the one that decides your romance.
Roll The Credits Your Romance Is…
Four love stories, four completely different ideas of what it means to be somebody's person. This is the one that matches how you actually fall, and what it would ask of you.
Harry & Sally
You do not fall for strangers. You fall for the person you have already been talking to for years, which is the slowest and by some distance the most durable way anybody has found to do this.
- When Harry Met Sally made the case that the best romance is an argument you enjoy, conducted over a decade, by two people refusing to admit what is happening.
- You want to be known rather than swept away. Somebody who remembers your worst story is doing better work than anybody arriving with flowers.
- The film is unusually honest about timing. These two are wrong for each other repeatedly until suddenly they are not, and neither of them engineered it.
- You would still be talking about everything at eighty. That is the entire promise.
Love & Basketball
You want a partner, not an audience. Somebody who wants their own life as badly as you want yours, and who would never ask you to be smaller to make the relationship easier.
- This is the rare romance where both people have a real career and the film takes both of them equally seriously.
- You would rather be pushed than protected. The right person for you is also a bit of a rival, and that never entirely goes away.
- It understands the actual problem in ambitious relationships. Not whether you love each other, but whose turn it is this year.
- You would still be competing at forty. That is how you would know it was working.
Heated Rivalry
The intensity was never the problem. The secrecy is. You are drawn to a love that lives entirely in private, and to the particular ache of wanting somebody you are not supposed to want.
- Heated Rivalry runs on the oldest engine in romance: two people on opposite sides, meeting in secret, getting far more attached than either of them planned.
- You keep your private life genuinely private, and something in you finds hidden things more real than public ones.
- The tension is not only between the two of them. It is between what they have and what it would cost either one to say it out loud.
- Years of this, and the whole story is really about whether either of them will finally stop hiding.
Titanic
You do not do this cautiously. When it happens for you it is immediate and total and it rearranges everything, and you would not accept a smaller version of it.
- Titanic gave us the biggest romance in film history and then made it last about five days, which is precisely the point of it.
- You measure love by intensity rather than duration. A few days of the real thing beats decades of something merely comfortable.
- The film is not only about the romance. It is about a woman who went on to live an enormous life afterwards because of it.
- You would still be telling this story at a hundred years old, and telling it exactly the same way.
The Wolf King has serious A Court of Thorns and Roses vibes, right down to the unexpected love triangle that develops after Aurora’s kidnapping. But it’s also insanely bingeable, with a fast-paced plot, multiple steamy interludes, and complicated political worldbuilding that deftly weaves werewolf lore with stories of the historical clans of Scotland. And whether you end up Team Callum or Team Blake, there are plenty of possessive, enemies-to-lovers, and forced proximity vibes to enjoy.
‘The Wolf King’ Has the Potential to Run for Several Seasons
Like Outlander, The Wolf King is a multi-book series, which means Starz and showrunner Tanya Saracho (Vida) have plenty of material to work with. It also means that there’s every chance this show will be made with an eye to multiple seasons from the very beginning. Sequel The Night Prince was released in 2025, and the final installment, The Wolf Queen, is slated to hit shelves next year.
While the series is structured as a trilogy, there’s honestly so much going on that it wouldn’t be surprising to see a TV adaptation run for as long as five seasons. Plus, there are plenty of secondary characters and subplots that could easily fuel interconnected spin-offs and/or prequels should the show’s creatives desire to expand the series’ world beyond the pages of Palphreyman’s novels. (To be fair, there’s more to work with here than Matthew B. Roberts had when he created Blood of My Blood!)
A blend of Sarah J. Maas and Outlander with a dash of Underworld for good measure, The Wolf King has all the signs of being a big hit when it finally arrives on Starz. We’ll definitely be seated for it.
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