I can’t speak for anyone else, but I much prefer JK Rowling now that her primary job involves being sensible on Twitter. She has been sensible about gay marriage, she has been sensible about Serena Williams, and she has been sensible about teabags. In fact, if it wasn’t for her total inability to reply to tweets without either retweeting them or putting a full-stop at the front – a technique exclusively reserved for narcissists and people who spend their lives being angry about trains – JK Rowling would be the perfect tweeter.
Right after the opera, Potter-on-ice and the interpretative dance version of Beedle the Bard #NotActuallyHappening https://t.co/fJgy5rlwBc
— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) August 8, 2015
Especially now that she’s kiboshed the notion of a Harry Potter TV series. This weekend, it was suggested to Rowling that she might consider licensing Harry Potter out for a TV series. Her reply, “Right after the opera, Potter-on-ice and the interpretative dance version of Beedle the Bard #NotActuallyHappening” certainly seems like a definitive no. And, by my calculations, this would make Harry Potter the only film franchise in modern history not to be turned into a TV show.
Because they’re all over the place. There’s a Scream show now. There’s a Teen Wolf show. There’s a Bad Teacher show. There’s a Catfish show. There’s a 12 Monkeys show. There’s a Psycho show (in the form of Bates Motel). There’s an About a Boy show. There’s – for the time being at least – a Hannibal show. Soon there’ll be a Minority Report show, and a Westworld show, and a Big show, and a Devil’s Advocate show and possibly even a The Truman Show show.
I’m deliberately not mentioning the worst offender, because it’s only Tuesday and your life is already miserable enough. Actually, screw it. There’s going to be an Uncle Buck show. Another Uncle Buck show. It might even end up being based on the Uncle Buck show from 1990, which was so abnormally bad that it seems to have served as the sole inspiration for Too Many Cooks.
But know this: it never ends. Just yesterday, for example, I received an email alerting me to a new TV show based on the Jackie Chan film Rush Hour. Rush Hour, for crying out loud. That film was literally just the same scene – man walks into a room and annoys everyone, man’s friend beats everyone up – repeated over and over again for a couple of hours. Watching an entire series of that is going to make you feel like you’ve been simultaneously struck down by locked-in syndrome and transient global amnesia.
This isn’t a new phenomenon at all. Past generations had to suffer through TV versions of Casablanca, Honey I Shrunk the Kids, Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, Planet of the Apes, Robocop, The Terminator, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Shaft and Bigfoot and the Hendersons. But now it does feel that we’ve hit saturation point. Especially because, for every success story like Fargo or Wet Hot American Summer: First Day of Camp, there are still dozens that exist purely to force you into an unending state of blank depression. I’ve just discovered, for instance, that there was once a TV show based on the Sandra Bullock film The Net, and now I’m just too sad to do anything else with my day.
So, good for JK Rowling. The absolute last thing the world needs is a long-running Harry Potter series, where the characters have so solve a different half-baked mystery every week and the cast are all 35 years old by the time it ends. Unless it’s followed up by another show called Harry Potter: The New Class, of course, because those are always great.
