Peacock’s ‘Dungeon Crawler Carl’ Series Has One Thing the Books Prove It Needs

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Carl attacks on the cover of This Inevitable Ruin

Published Oct 8, 2026, 7:47 AM EDT

Michael Hein has been covering entertainment, fandom news, and trending topics since 2016 on outlets including Rogues Portal, PopCulture.com, and ComicBook.com. He has provided live coverage of red carpet premieres, conventions, and up-fronts, and has interviewed major stars including Charles Dance, Patrick Stewart, and Chloe Sevigny. An avid fiction reader and writer, Michael has been diving deep into all the biggest book-to-screen adaptations of the last decade, from Game of Thrones to Foundation.

Dungeon Crawler Carl fans often emphasize how fun and absurd the series is when recommending it, knowing full well that the new reader they're initiating will soon be overwhelmed by the inherent horror of the series. It's right there in the premise — the series opens with a global extinction event brought on by alien technology before sweeping readers into a fantasy-themed game where the stakes often exceed life or death. The moments of levity are only possible because they undercut the incomprehensible violence of the situation, and the first-person protagonist takes pains never to forget that. Author Matt Dinniman has pulled off storytelling magic to maintain this balance in the books, but it will be a whole new challenge for the TV adaptation coming soon to Peacock.

Thankfully, the Dungeon Crawler Carl TV series will have Dinniman as an executive producer, while audiobook narrator Jeff Hays will reprise his role as Princess Donut on TV. Still, TV is a very different medium from books, and adaptations often struggle with tone — especially when the source material was written in the first person. Even if Carl were to narrate the entire TV show, the story wouldn't have the same psychological distance that it has in the books. Keeping the stakes high without overwhelming or depressing the audience is going to be a constant battle for the show, but it's vital to the series' success and continuation.

'Dungeon Crawler Carl' is a Horror Story

Dinniman gets a lot of praise for the way Dungeon Crawler Carl fuses science fiction and fantasy. His world employs technology so advanced and powerful that it might as well be magic, while characters in Dungeon Crawler World utilize enhancements that seem so magical, it's easy to forget they're actually sci-fi on some level. Rarely does fantasy worldbuilding like this feel so thorough and authentic while being presented so flippantly. That's because Dinniman wastes no time in pushing the story forward, trusting readers to roll with the punches until the exposition can come out organically. That urgency to advance the plot is where a third genre gains a strong foothold — horror.

The premise of this story is a cosmic horror from the start, and that doesn't change even as readers learn more details in subsequent books. That incomprehensible nightmare looms in the background while the earthlings deal with an endless onslaught of smaller-scale terrors every day. Carl's blunt narration of violence sometimes draws a nervous laugh or two, but he himself never leaves any doubt that he is sensitive to what he's experiencing. Carl's unique way of processing all that trauma is what gives this series its most unique and resonant theme — resistance against systemic oppression.

The individual antagonists of Dungeon Crawler Carl are often humanized, even if we never quite sympathize with them. Carl himself sometimes questions the lengths he goes to in order to take vengeance on the non-earthlings in the dungeon, but his broad perspective of justice is what keeps him moving. Carl holds every individual participant in the Crawl responsible for what has happened to him and his planet. In doing so, he always keeps the scale of this atrocity at the top of our minds while we're reading. The audience may tune in for the sci-fi and fantasy hijinks, but Carl is driven by the horror above all else.

Carl's commitment to not just surviving the crawl, but dismantling the systems that made it possible is the stand-out feature of this series. It's a big part of the reason that it is a bestseller still building its massive fanbase. In that way, the inherent horror baked into every moment of this story is even more important to Dungeon Crawler Carl's success than the sci-fi and fantasy elements that make up its set-dressing.

'Dungeon Crawler Carl' Will Challenge TV Conventions

As always, a shot-for-shot adaptation of the Dungeon Crawler Carl books would be ideal, but bringing a novel to the screen is never that simple. We already know that Dinniman doesn't anticipate this show including every word from his books — this summer, he told KPBS that "each book alone would be multiple seasons if we did everything." He believes the most important thing for the show is to capture the characters of Carl and Donut, suggesting that they "need to be as closely written to the book as possible in order for it to maintain its popularity amongst existing fans."

That's a lot to hope for from the start, but these two characters also need the proper context to remain faithful to the books. Inevitably, TV producers or studio executives will be tempted to soften the edges of this franchise, but they would risk minimizing its impact in the process. Earth needs to face a sudden, violent extinction event in order for the story to work, and crawlers need to be handled ruthlessly and callously from the start. The reality TV premise is always good for a laugh when it undercuts the blood and gore, but it should never be used to sugarcoat the situation. That doesn't seem to be the case on Dungeon Crawler World, so it shouldn't be the case on Peacock's Dungeon Crawler Carl.

There are many big questions surrounding the Dungeon Crawler Carl TV adaptation, but won't get a peek at the show itself for quite a while. The series just entered production over the summer, with a season order from Peacock. There's no release date yet, and aside from Hays, no other characters have been cast. In the meantime, there are eight novels in the series available now in print, digital, and audiobook formats.