This is something I wrote on Facebook yesterday.
Why make a Harry Potter television series? Why re-adapt the books? Besides WB wanting to make money with the IP, of course.
I doubt I’ll watch it — I don’t have the former HBO Max, and don’t plan on having it in the future — but there’s a way of doing a Harry Potter television series that would, I think, justify re-adapting the series.
Don’t center it on Harry, Hermione, Ron, and House Gryffindor.
There are lots of students at Hogwarts. There are other Houses — Ravenclaw, Hufflepuff, Slytherin, even Sparklypoo. Build the series around other characters, tell their stories, and let the events of the novels/movies be the backdrop. What do the Harry Potter years look like to students in Ravenclaw? What are their classes like? How do they interact with characters familiar and not?
I don’t pick Ravenclaw at random. If I were the one developing this series, I’d build it around Luna Lovegood, Ravenclaw, who is in the same class year (IIRC) as Harry and gang but doesn’t appear until the fifth book. The series could be framed with Evanna Lynch reprising her role as Luna from the films, telling the story of what her Hogwarts life was like to her absurdly named children. This gives the series maximum creative freedom to create and develop racially and gender diverse characters that don’t exist in the novels and tell new stories that create a larger, more nuanced understanding of the Wizarding World.
That’s what I would do. That has some creative merit.
A straightforward re-adaptation of the novels, twenty years after they were adapted as films, when those films remain popular and in wide circulation? Not so much.
