If the embed above has been confiscated by Filch, the clip is also here on YouTube.
HBO has released the first full scene from Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, and has chosen to open the account with dinner. Titled The Start-of-Term Banquet, the clip went up on Saturday 14 November on HBO Max’s YouTube channel and the official Harry Potter Instagram account, six weeks before the series arrives on Christmas Day. After two teasers and a small wall of character posters, this is the first time the thing has stood still long enough to be judged as drama instead of as a montage with a choir on it.
What it shows is the Great Hall on Harry’s first night, just after the Sorting. The students are chanting Dumbledore’s name with the enthusiasm of the home end at a lower-league ground, John Lithgow’s headmaster snaps his fingers, and the tables fill up: roasts, vegetables, puddings, the lot. Dominic McLaughlin’s Harry, sat with Alastair Stout’s Ron, regards the spread exactly as a boy raised in a cupboard on Dursley leftovers ought to, which is to say like a man who has been handed the keys to a carvery. By most accounts it is the most persuasive thing in the clip.
Then comes the part that has people rewinding. Up at the staff table, Janet McTeer’s McGonagall remarks to Dumbledore that the boy looks like his father, and Dumbledore replies that Harry has a spirit of his own. None of this is in the book, where the feast is seen strictly from Harry’s seat and the grown-ups are a row of interesting hats in the distance. For a series that has been sold on its fidelity, it is a telling choice. Television has hours the films never had, and on this evidence some of them are going to be spent with the teachers. Having hired Lithgow, McTeer and Paapa Essiedu, it would be a strange economy to keep them as scenery.
Reaction has split along lines you could have drawn in advance. The 2001 film played this moment hushed and candlelit, all gasps and John Williams. The series plays it loud: a school dinner hall with better catering. Some viewers think the racket is truer to several hundred children who have just been promised pudding; others miss the reverence. Here at SFcrowsnest, we would only observe that anyone who has eaten in a real school hall knows which version is the documentary. The new Great Hall set, incidentally, looks very like the old one, which seems wise. There are things an audience will let you rebuild and things it wants left where it put them.
The appetite is not in doubt. HBO says the first teaser, back in March, drew 277 million views in 48 hours, making it the most-watched trailer the company has ever put out. The eight-episode first season begins on HBO Max on Friday 25 December, in Britain as well as the US, with the rest following weekly.
So that is one feast down, with seven books’ worth of school dinners still to come. At the pace television gets made these days, half the first-years will be shaving by the time anybody mentions a troll in the dungeons.
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