It's All There But the Magic

Most of you have probably already given in to your morbid curiosity and watched the trailer for the new HBO Max Harry Potter series, a project that feels weirdly … dead on arrival. I’m sure I’m wrong — HBO is not going to sink an estimated $2-$8 billion into a series unless they’re damn sure it’s not going to flop. But if there was any hope of winning over those of us already dead set against it, the first trailer has basically reinforced our skepticism.

And it’s not the JK Rowling of it all, although it’s certainly that, too. And it’s not even that it’s too soon to remake a property whose decade-long run wrapped only 15 years ago. It’s mostly that the trailer promises us nothing new or original or fun or interesting. The chief complaint that book readers had with the original movies, after all, was that they were too faithful to the novels — those films locked our imaginations in the closet and trapped Warner Bros.’ vision of that universe in amber. I don’t even remember how I pictured the original characters before Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, and Emma Watson held our collective imaginations at gunpoint.

But this? This? It’s not enough to say that the series already feels like a copy of a copy of a copy — faded and drab and completely lacking. There’s no magic here, not like one of my all-time favorite trailers promised for another beloved adaptation of a children’s book, Where the Wild Things Are (if only the movie had been half as good as the trailer).

This trailer is just so very … meh. And “meh” doesn’t even capture how spectacularly insubstantial it feels. It’s not even slop. It’s watered-down slop. It’s painfully ordinary. It’s basic. It elicits nothing — not outrage, not excitement, just eyerolls that feel more like shrugs.

I’m sure HBO will market the series so aggressively that some folks will feel compelled to watch it listlessly, drool pooling on their sofa cushions. But I can’t imagine anything more profoundly unremarkable than this trailer. It’s a complete waste of what will eventually be 70-80 hours of television and billions of dollars that could have been used to produce — I don’t know. Eighty seasons of original programming like DTF St. Louis.