Dear Hollywood, take notes from 'Harry Potter' and 'Crazy Rich Asians'—our books need series

If you've ever finished a book adaptation and immediately complained about everything it left out, welcome to the club. Book lovers have spent years watching their favourite stories get squeezed into two-hour movies, with entire subplots, character backstories, and tiny details that made the books special disappearing along the way. Now, with beloved titles like Harry Potter getting a fresh television adaptation and Crazy Rich Asians expanding into a series, the conversation around book-to-screen adaptations is getting interesting again. Could television be the format readers have been waiting for?

The massive love that Off Campus, Elle Kennedy's hockey romance series adapted for Prime Video, received adds to the conversation. Meanwhile, the movie adaptation of Ali Hazelwood's The Love Hypothesis has prompted discussions about what gets lost when a novel is condensed for the big screen. For readers who have spent hundreds of pages getting attached to fictional characters, those missing moments can matter just as much as the main plot. And honestly, if we are going to spend our weekends obsessing over fictional couples, we would like the full experience.

A series gives books the breathing room they deserve

The biggest advantage of a television adaptation is pretty obvious: time. A book can spend entire chapters building a character's personality, exploring complicated family dynamics, or making a romance feel believable. A film has to make difficult choices about what stays and what goes, often prioritising the central storyline to fit its runtime.

The upcoming Harry Potter series, which will adapt the books across multiple seasons, is probably the biggest example. HBO has promised a deeper exploration of the original stories, with room for details and characters that the films could not fully accommodate. The first season, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, is scheduled to premiere in December 2026.

Meanwhile, the Crazy Rich Asians television project offers another reason to be excited about revisiting a fictional world, with an eight-episode continuation bringing back familiar faces from the 2018 film. Both the projects highlight television's potential to give established stories more room to grow.

Romance readers have their own reasons to celebrate. The first season of Off Campus adapts The Deal, following Hannah Wells and Garrett Graham through their fake-dating arrangement and everything that comes with it. With eight episodes, the show had room to develop friendships, secondary romances, and the emotional baggage that made the characters more than just another fictional couple to obsess over. The series has now been renewed for a second season, which is based on The Score and will focus on Allie and Dean. That leaves plenty of scope to explore more of Elle Kennedy's interconnected stories.

Can a movie ever do a book justice?

Of course, a series is not automatically a better adaptation. A tightly written novel can become a brilliant film, and a television show can still cut important scenes, change character motivations, or miss the point entirely. The real challenge is understanding what readers connected with in the first place.

Take The Love Hypothesis, which stars Lili Reinhart and Tom Bateman as Olive Smith and Adam Carlsen. The film runs for around 110 minutes, meaning the filmmakers had to squeeze Ali Hazelwood's novel into a relatively short runtime. Reinhart has spoken about how adaptations need to preserve the feelings a book creates, rather than simply recreate every page. Readers want the chemistry, the awkwardness, the emotional payoff, and all those little moments that made them fall for the story, and they did get it. But while the makers did that, they also completely skipped characters and subplots, which the book fans were not at all happy about. 

Ultimately, the best format depends on the story. Some books need a two-hour movie; others need eight episodes, several seasons, or an entire fictional universe to do them justice. I mean, can you imagine Game of Thrones as a movie?

But as more beloved books make their way to television, readers are making one thing clear: if a story has enough depth to fill hundreds of pages, giving it a little extra screen time might be a very good idea. After all, nobody wants to say goodbye to their favourite fictional people before they have even finished getting to know them.

Lead image: IMDb

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