Austin Butler Sci-Fi Series Shannara Chronicles Comes to ITVX
ITV has announced that The Shannara Chronicles, a fantasy series featuring Oscar nominee Austin Butler and Indiana Jones actor John Rhys-Davies, will be available on ITVX this summer. The series originally aired on MTV for two seasons before its abrupt cancellation.
Who is Austin Butler and how did he rise to prominence?
Austin Butler, now 34, built his early career on American children's television. His first notable role was in the Nickelodeon series Zoey 101, opposite Jamie Lynn Spears. He then secured recurring parts in Life Unexpected and Switched at Birth, both on The CW network.
Butler later took a leading role in The Carrie Diaries, a prequel to Sex And The City. His transition to film came through Quentin Tarantino's Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, where he portrayed Tex Watson. However, it was his performance as Elvis Presley in Baz Luhrmann's biopic that established him as a major figure in cinema. The role earned him a BAFTA and a Golden Globe, though the Academy Award for Best Actor went to Brendan Fraser for The Whale.
Since then, Butler has appeared in the Apple TV+ miniseries Masters of the Air, Denis Villeneuve's Dune: Part Two, and Darren Aronofsky's Caught Stealing. He is reportedly attached to Michael Mann's long-awaited sequel to Heat.
What is The Shannara Chronicles about?
Before these prominent film roles, Butler held a central part in The Shannara Chronicles, a series that received modest attention during its initial run in the 2010s. The show adapts Terry Brooks' The Sword of Shannara trilogy of fantasy novels.
The narrative is set on an Earth thousands of years after the fall of human civilisation. The surviving world, divided into the Four Lands, is inhabited by elves, dwarves, trolls, gnomes, and humans. At the centre of the story is the Shannara family, whose descendants carry ancient magic and whose actions determine the fate of the world.
An ITV spokesperson provided the following summary of the second series: