HP on TV

[kirst_inn]

Rocito (sorry if that's a misspelling - I deleted your name by 
accident) wrote:
> I was thinking that the harry potter series would be great to be 
made for TV. Maybe a miniseries or any kind of show with several 
episodes. <snip> If you make a chapter or two into one episode, and 
you show them once a week it would last the whole year. You could put
every little detail of the book, even the funny parts that are almost 
completely omitted in the films (Fred and George!!!!!). Every year 
would be one season, and you'd have seven seasons assured. It could 
be a British production for all the world or maybe HBO>

It's an interesting idea. My mind jumped immediately to the 
television series of my other favourite book series, Tales of the 
City, which was produced by Channel 4 in Britain, and from there to 
other high-profile tv series adapted from books. The thing is that 
the self-contained nature of the books don't necessarily lend 
themselves very well to television-style viewing, where the Tales of 
the City books, which were originally written as a daily serial in a 
newspaper, do. Tales works well because it has a soap opera format 
which means that the audience attention is spread between plot 
strands. The mid-90's BBC version of Pride and Prejudice worked 
similarly - attention was centered on Lizzie Bennet, but could leave 
her and go off somewhere else. The big-budget adaptation of the 
Chronicles of Narnia which the BBC ran when I was a child worked well 
because narrative agency was spread between the different children 
who were in Narnia at whatever point (I think they got up to The 
Silver Chair). I'm not trying to say that multiple point of view is 
the key to all good long-running literary adaptations (it just looks 
like that) but I'm not entirely sure that Harry's singular world-view 
could take that sort of stretching. Also, to come back to the point I 
was orignally trying to make (I'm a bit poorly and not holding 
threads very well at the moment. Sorry), I think the books suit 
cinema and the contained nature of a film rather than being stretched 
over weeks. Yes, I'm longing for a six-part adaptation of GoF as much 
as everyone else on list, but would each series (by which I mean what 
you call "season" in America) stand up to a viewing public prepared 
to miss one or more episodes? Each of the books is plotted so tightly 
that tiny clues towards eventual outcomes are offered in the most 
unexpected places. I know there are a few Buffy fans on list, and as 
my cousin is a huge Buffy fan, I know that it's the sort of thing you 
have to be devoted to to follow properly. Myself, I'm not a big telly 
watcher, and I lack the discipline of a fixed schedule, and therefore 
tend to miss odd bits of serieses. Would HP manage to win over a 
viewing audience in this way?
Oh sorry. What rubbish I'm typing today.
Kirstini, off to have a hot toddy, and maybe bury her head.