As an animal-loving friend once remarked, the only thing worse than flogging a dead horse is flogging a live one. That thought crossed my mind this week when HBO announced some of the casting for its Harry Potter TV series. Do we need a Harry Potter TV series? Whatever you think of JK Rowling’s views on gender, most people will agree that her seven Harry Potter books are stonking good yarns. The trouble is that they have already spawned eight movies, three movie “prequels” (with two more planned), 14 video games, a marathon stage adaptation and (at the last count) five theme parks around the globe.
So has this particular horse been flogged to death? In one sense it’s still very much alive. Millions of children clearly still adore Harry. Otherwise HBO wouldn’t be investing hundreds of millions in yet more Hogwartsian hogwash. But in another sense it’s dead as a dodo. Dozens of screenwriters will now be tasked with trying to tickle, cajole or indeed flog some flicker of life out of the exhausted old nag.
Actually, more than a flicker. We are told that these new TV spin-offs are expected to run to seven series, stretched over ten years. But will they be any good? The history of that debilitating showbiz pandemic known as sequelitis or rebootenza overwhelmingly suggests not.
Yes, we can all point to screen sequels that excelled the original. The Godfather Part II, with Robert De Niro recruited to play the young Vito Corleone in those epic flashbacks, is undoubtedly a darker and deeper drama than The Godfather. Paddington 2 was funnier than Paddington. Star Wars was good, but its successor, The Empire Strikes Back, was stunning.
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Similarly, we can all recall TV dramas designed from the outset to unfold over several series, which they proceeded to do with flawless continuity and unflagging tension. Succession is one example. Another, at least in my book, is that extraordinary thriller The Americans, about two Russian spies embedded in suburban Washington during the Cold War. Three years ago, recuperating from some heavy-duty surgery, I devoured all of its 75 episodes in a fortnight of sleepless nights. I honestly think its vivid acting and superbly weaved plots got me through the worst health crisis of my life.
But far outnumbering such immaculately crafted long-runners are instances where movies or TV series have been stretched into franchises that get increasingly far-fetched and slackly directed. Sometimes you sense it’s because the actors have demanded a chance to show their “emotional range”, when what made the first series successful was its nonstop pace and thrills. I used to love Spooks when its main characters got killed off, usually gruesomely, almost every week, before they had time to get “interesting”. But then the scriptwriters started allowing them to indulge in marital turmoil and mental breakdowns lasting months and months, and I got bored. I can get all that at home.
The other problem with thrillers eked out over many series is that the plotting becomes so esoterically complex that viewers who can’t remember which character shafted which in the series before last are left feeling bamboozled. I would place even the vastly hyped Line of Duty in this category. Can it be true that a seventh series is in the pipeline? Wasn’t the revelation at the end of series six — that the dreary copper from Birmingham was the dastardly evil mastermind all along — enough of a deflating anticlimax?
There are, it seems to me, two causes of sequelitis. The first is lazy thinking. It must be so much easier to bring back characters that the public already knows, rather than breaking new ground. It probably seems less risky financially too.
And the second is the vast number of hours, on hundreds of TV and streaming channels, that now need filling each week. Between them Netflix, Warner, Disney, Paramount and all the broadcast networks have created this monster called “home entertainment” that constantly needs feeding with “new” product (I use the quotation marks advisedly), while the funding to do so is diminishing as the audience fragments. So panicking executives reach for sequels, self-regurgitating TV dramas and literally endless soaps as a way of meeting the demand.
The consequences for the industry are fraught with existential dangers. Why employ expensive people to write sequels and act in them, when AI bots have been designed for exactly this task of sucking up human creativity like vampires and rebooting it as “new work”? When franchises such as Harry Potter already seem as if they are churning out product and merchandise on a factory production line, will we even notice the difference if robots take over the whole show?
Moving towards Proms parity
For the first 89 seasons of the Proms, the world’s foremost classical music festival, not a single woman was invited to conduct. I was there on the momentous night in 1984 when the Cuban-American pioneer Odaline de la Martinez was permitted to ascend the Royal Albert Hall’s podium, albeit to direct some tough contemporary music that probably none of the men fancied.
Even in the 1980s the musical world was still awash with pseudo-scientific theories about women’s brains not being wired to compose music and women not being commanding enough to conduct it. So much female talent must have been (in Thomas Gray’s immortal line) “born to blush unseen” in the centuries when women were effectively excluded from professional music making.
So it’s fascinating to look through this summer’s BBC Proms line-up, unveiled yesterday, and see how far women have come. The Last Night of the Proms, which is classical music’s big moment in the global TV spotlight, features a female conductor (the Hong Kong-born Elim Chan), plus two female soloists and premieres by two female composers. Of the season’s other 59 conductors, 15 are women. That’s not parity, but it’s moving in the right direction — and not before time.
