As Game of Thrones begins its planned final seasons, there’s been a question haunting its home network. What will HBO do without its tentpole show? The answer, to a certain degree, is more of the same: there are four Thrones spin-offs currently in the early development stages. But David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, the two showrunners responsible for bringing George R.R. Martin’s saga to the screen, have declared they won’t be working on those spin-offs. To underline their point, Weiss, Benioff, and HBO just announced what the pair will be working on, once the battle of ice and fire has been fought and won.

HBO has greenlit an alternative-history drama called Confederate. Set in a version of the United States where the confederacy won the right to secede from the Union in the 1800s, Weiss and Benioff’s new series will dive headlong into potentially sticky subject matter dealing with race relations and slavery. The logline provided by the network:

Confederate chronicles the events leading to the Third American Civil War. The series takes place in an alternate timeline, where the southern states have successfully seceded from the Union, giving rise to a nation in which slavery remains legal and has evolved into a modern institution. The story follows a broad swath of characters on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Demilitarized Zone — freedom fighters, slave hunters, politicians, abolitionists, journalists, the executives of a slave-holding conglomerate and the families of people in their thrall.

Since this series is an original property and not based on any preexisting source material, we can only speculate what the subject of the second American Civil War was, and what time period this series is set. Whatever year it is, there will be no avoiding parallels to the racial tensions exploding in Trump’s America right now. But are these the right people to tell that story?

Weiss and Benioff came under fire mid-way through the massively successful Game of Thrones run for the way their series depicted race and slavery in Westeros and Essos. Specifically, the show weathered the critique that one of its female leads, Emilia Clarke’s Daenerys Targaryen, was a “white savior” stereotype.

And though Thrones is more popular than ever, both the show and the source material on which it’s based still have prominent critics. Emmy-nominated actor David Oyelowo brought up the HBO series in a Radio Times interview last year when addressing the lack of diverse roles in film and television. “There should be space for bigger characters,” he said in reference to supporting characters like Nathalie Emmanuel’s Missandei and Jacob Anderson’s Grey Worm. “Because you’re not just saying, ‘O.K. this is purely a white world, and here are very story-driven reasons why that’s the case.‘ Even if for whatever reason, it’s a world in which people of color in those stories are subservient, or they are more in a helper role, that doesn’t mean they can’t have prominent story lines. All you have to do is shift the focus to focus on those characters.”

Perhaps Confederate will do exactly that, shifting the focus to the characters who have sometimes been erased from the narrative of the Civil War. In a move to perhaps pre-empt criticism, Weiss and Benioff have also announced that non-white writers Nichelle Tramble Spellman (Justified, The Good Wife) and Malcolm Spellman (Empire) will be co-writing and executive producing the series. Also joining the team is long-time Game of Thrones producer Bernadette Caulfield, whom Weiss and Benioff called the heart and soul of the series at the Season 7 premiere in Los Angeles last week.

The showrunners released a joint statement on Confederate saying: “There won’t be dragons or White Walkers in this series, but we are creating a world, and we couldn’t imagine better partners in world-building than Nichelle and Malcolm, who have impressed us for a long time with their wit, their imagination and their Scrabble-playing skills.” Production on Confederate will begin when Game of Thrones wraps up either in late 2018 or early 2019.