I have been upfront about my particular disdain for the concept of the upcoming TV series, though, and talked about it before on this blog. I think that remakes, as a general rule, are aggressively boring, even those that pretend to be good. They fall into one of two camps: they're either "fine" and are overpraised for being able to successfully navigate a new story with modern storytelling techniques, or they're just cookie-cutter carbon copies of the original. There are (very rarely) movies that work as remakes, sometimes better than the original, though those usually aren't recreating classics (think something like the new Dune movies), but by-and-large most remakes are not good, and are the far more criminal adjective: boring.
But at this point I won't pretend that I won't watch the series, at least initially. Curiosity, rabid Harry Potter love, and societal expectations for making this so much of my persona have made that impossible (it's like how, on rare occasion, I think I should skip the Oscars because after months of winter some degree of Seasonal Affective Disorder has taken ahold, and I just don't want to...but I always do because it would destroy a cultivated personality around said show). I don't expect it to be good or for me to like it, but I want to see what's happening. And so I watched the trailer with hesitance, but also because I wanted it to be good-I always want movies & TV to be good, it takes up too much of my life to hope for something else.
My initial apprehension, though, feels warranted after watching it. The TV show, because of the billions of dollars that has been spent on the theme parks & merchandise related to the series already, looks aesthetically similar to the movies starring Daniel Radcliffe. I'm not one of those fans who is super precious about this (I would surely compare the two, but I think artists need to be able to have a vision beyond corporate overlords to be able to work, which is why I think Prisoner of Azkaban, the most off-the-beaten-path of the original eight films, is the best one), and to be fair it's honestly the video game Hogwarts Legacy that felt more the inspiration than the movies (perhaps a warning sign that you're overdoing the CGI too much when your set looks like a video game), but this is close enough as to be indistinguishable from the world that Chris Columbus brought forth 25 years ago. In the same way that the Disney Princess line is too lucrative for Emma Watson's Belle to suddenly show up in a bright red dress instead of yellow, no one is thinking outside the box so that the series can easily be incorporated into the theme parks.
There are moments, I will admit, that are genuinely interesting in the trailer, which I've watched a half dozen times by now. I'm a firm believer that television and film are different (no matter how much people want to treat them as the same), and there are moments in the trailer that feel like we're allowing the story to have some breathing room, perhaps even getting out from under not just the films, but also the books. A few that standout to me is the concept of Harry's solo relationship to Aunt Petunia, his maternal aunt (in the movies and virtually all of the novels, you only see Harry with Petunia-and-Vernon as a combined unit, which in real life would be impossible...he'd surely spend time with her without Vernon in the house on occasion, and given her complicated feelings for him, this feels like an interesting door to unlock), as well as scenes of the kids playing and Hagrid making a snow angel. These feel like we're growing character, and having that dreaded concept of a "filler" episode (something that is severely lacking & needed in modern television). What I want is something new, and (again), I'm very open to not just having the exact same experience. People have pointed out this is a story for children, and today's children have not encountered this story before with kids their own age so it's "okay" they're remaking it in that regard, which ignores the fact that, say, one generation of kids got The Wizard of Oz and another got Wicked, or that Greta Gerwig's upcoming The Magician's Nephew is a completely different tale than the usual batch from Narnia. Giving us something more, a grittier, more "you can see it in your daily life" spin on the story is easily the most enticing part for me...you need to give the audience unexpected, even if it's not what they say they want.
But so much of what I saw falls short. It's not that they have cast bad actors. John Lithgow, Janet McTeer, Bel Powley, Johnny Flynn...these are actors who have given strong, sometimes great performances in the past. But they are competing against original creations that are very hard to move beyond, particularly given the confines of a very rigid storytelling that won't let us think about these characters in different ways (i.e. how Cynthia Erivo & Margaret Hamilton are playing the same character, but are doing extremely different spins on it which allows both to work). Nick Frost comes across the worst of the bunch. If you'll recall, I nominated Robbie Coltrane for a My Ballot Award for the first film, and did so for a reason. He took a character with little bearing on the plot (Hagrid is beloved, but he's not consequential to Harry's journey other than to start it, certainly not in the way that Dumbledore, Snape, or even someone like Umbridge or Sirius Black are), and made it iconic, feeling like it's plucked from the pages of Rowling's novel. Frost doesn't have the same imposing nature & the same deep voice as Coltrane did, and while you cannot judge a performance solely from a trailer (and Frost's past acting surely indicates that he has the ability to play goofy, which is necessary for Hagrid), it reads like cosplay, which will get insufferable pretty quickly in a TV series. Spending 8-10 hours saying "this was better the first time" is a dreadful way to spend a weekend.
In many ways this resembles a Disney live-action remake-it gives you a sense of the wonder, but feels like a copy (and in this case, a copy-of-a-copy). The book and film series were wonderful, and done correctly. Unless you expand beyond them, it's impossible to really top them, even if you come close. It's not just Frost. Hans Zimmer has made many memorable film scores...but he ain't John Williams. Alan Rickman, Maggie Smith, Jason Isaacs, Imelda Staunton, Stuart Craig...the movie series was just too good to work in comparison. I mean this genuinely when I say I don't see the point of this. It's clear they didn't want to try something new (like a story about the founders of Hogwarts) because between The Rings of Power and Fantastic Beasts, movie studios are terrified to try something new because the public never reacts in the same way (and doesn't spend the same amount of cash), and even when a series actually works outside of those confines (think things like WandaVision, Andor, and the first two seasons of The Mandalorian), they don't learn that lesson. But I can't help, while watching this, to feel sad-that for the first time the original Harry Potter series is going to settle for "pretty good." I will watch it, as I said above-not just because of societal obligation, but out of genuine curiosity & intoxication with this world...but I don't expect to love it. And it's not because I'm no longer a teenager (to know me is to know that I can still muster a sense of wonder with the best of them), but because what I'm seeing...isn't magical.
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