Lord save us from the tyranny of faithfulness.
Here’s a good bit in a recent Variety report on the upcoming Harry Potter series: “Many fans have questioned the purpose of a TV reboot given the film franchise is pretty much perfect as is.” Ha ha! Never mind that “perfect as is”. Nobody with more than a teaspoon of grey matter questions the “purpose” of this particular “reboot”. It’s all about revenue, baby. From the moment, in 2011, when the end titles rolled on Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2, punters were betting on how long Warner Bros could decently leave it before announcing a remake. Nobody would have been surprised if the new Harry Potter popped up mid-credits to trail an immediate second crack at Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone.
We had a hit play in the West End. We had a theme park. We had the finest imaginable illustration of the diminishing-return dynamic with the initially fine, then dire Fantastic Beasts film sequence. None of these activities was, however, likely to generate the chatter that is already gathering around the new HBO show.
If anything Warner Bros has shown restraint. I would have bet on it going back to the well about a decade after the film series ended. It had the decency to wait until April 2023 before announcing the incoming show. There is some dispute over whether each season will focus on one of the seven books. That was the initial report, but, given that the early volumes are slim and the later ones stop bullets, such a scheme would deliver unevenly proportioned entertainments. The adaptation of Deathly Hallows could still be running when everyone reading this is dead. Also, we’re told the show will be with us for 10 years. So that equation won’t balance unless JK Rowling writes another three books (gawd ’elp us).
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One thing we do know. The new show will be “faithful”. We know because people keep saying so. “This new Max Original series will dive deep into each of the iconic books that fans have continued to enjoy for all of these years,” Casey Bloys, the chairman and chief executive of HBO and Max content (quite a mouthful), said before going on to assure those fans that the show would be “a faithful adaptation”. The first tweet announcing the project also mentioned “faithful adaptation”. That F-word is more bandied about here than in any space not associated with The Traitors.
So is this, aside from the accumulation of dosh, the true purpose of the reboot? We got further clarification this week with a supportive response from the director of the first two films. “You can get all the stuff in the series that we didn’t have an opportunity to do,” Chris Columbus said. “All these great scenes that we just couldn’t put in the films.” He went on to say, “I think it’s great.” The aesthetic argument – if we can so dignify it – runs that the series will allow the makers to translate every last comma, hyphen and ellipsis from page to screen. The contemporary addiction to faithfulness will meet its satisfaction in a decade of slavish recitation. If even the shortest syllable goes missing the internet will make sure to burst a blood vessel in performative fury.
Okay, this has always gone on to an extent. The search for someone to embody an “accurate” Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind became an international obsession close to 90 years ago. Television series of classic novels (you know, things that aren’t Harry Potter) rarely deviate far from the text. But the anal fixation on faithfulness is very much a phenomenon of the social-media age. There are, out there, a horde of people demanding that superhero films be “comics accurate”. One can only imagine how a contemporaneous version of Twitter would have reacted to the cavalier adaptation of the James Bond books in the 1970s. So different was The Spy Who Loved Me from its alleged source that the Bond folk commissioned a separate “book of the film” to sell alongside Ian Fleming’s 1962 novel.
The hyperfans no longer crave adaptation. They crave something closer to a note-perfect recital of a musical score. The Potterites can follow along, finger to the sheet, as the series moves through its crescendos and diminuendos. Might they eventually get bored? The supreme example of the faithful TV adaptation is Brideshead Revisited, from 1981. Granada Television spent 659 minutes adapting an Evelyn Waugh novel that, in my edition, runs to just 315 pages. Let’s call it two minutes a page. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix comes in at 766 pages. That works out, by the Brideshead Scale, at more than 25 hours of television for just one volume. Be careful what you wish for.
