Out of curiosity both morbid and, I must admit, genuine, I watched HBO’s half-hour making-of doc about the new Harry Potter TV series on Sunday night. It’s so weird that only 15 years after the final movie, this franchise is getting a whole new interpretation. It took 16 years for Star Wars to introduce us to Jar Jar Binks, and HP waited less time to Jar Jar it up with the Fantastic Beasts movies (the first is excellent, I think; the following two are abominations). But the upcoming Harry Potter show is something quite other than spinoff or prequel. It is a wholesale, soup-to-nuts remounting of the stories already so lavishly told in eight films. And I just can’t understand why they’re doing it.

I mean, I understand the financials. David Zaslav took a swim in the company gold vault one day and decided that certain coins were moldering a bit, gaining too much patina, and he said hey let’s polish these off and reinvest them and make even more coins so someone will eventually buy the whole vault. The extant HP film series will earn Warner Bros. money forever, but what if there was even more IP to pile on top of that? What if they could stretch subscriber calls to action out across seven seasons, each covering one of the Harry Potter books? Wouldn’t that be brilliant? The purse holders said yes and thus this series, this wretched thing packaged in such effortful wonder. 

J.K. Rowling is a monster, one of the most galling examples of an extraordinarily rich person proving incomprehensibly unable to simply disappear within those riches. Why, if you had her money, would you ever be on twitter? Why wouldn’t you be on a Greek island unknown to most of the world, attended to by the corps of some needy male ballet company, surrounded by friends and loved ones for whom you have made life immeasurably easier? Why wouldn’t you be in Rio for Carnival, Bali for Christmas, Tasmania in some tiny slip of spring when the rolling sheep hills are particularly green? Why wouldn’t you spend the rest of your life doing literally anything but tweeting?

But Rowling has indeed spent the last few years pathetically online, doubling and tripling and quadrupling down on making life worse for like 1 percent of the human population. Because she has gone gold-mad like a Tolkien character, because maybe she was always bad. Rowling wrote an East Asian character named Cho Chang. She had hook-nosed goblins control all the money. She reveled in a kind of Randian objectivism when it came to specialness and purpose that, happily enough for Harry, came with immeasurable wealth. 

I know all that, and yet I do still cherish my Harry Potter memories, how exciting it was—from my mid-teens to my early 20s—to get a new book and devour it in all its neat mythology. I like the movies a lot too; particularly 3, 4, 5, and 7 (1, 2, 6, and 8 are fine). Maybe I am, then, part of the exact target demographic for the Harry Potter show, an elder millennial who wasn’t doing HP quizzes all day on BuzzFeed, but did, I’m ashamed to admit, have a Pottermore account. (I just wanted to find out what house I was sorted into! Even though I always, always bitterly knew it would be Hufflepuff.) I think the marketing people peering at me from their telescopes probably think I have children, but otherwise they are not exactly wrong in assuming that I like Harry Potter, that its motifs and imagery carry some deal of nostalgic weight, that my curiosity will endure for quite some time. 

But, I didn’t ask for a TV show. And I didn’t want Rowling to make more money. I also don’t want, as most mortal people don’t, some company saying to me, “Hey, it’s already time to redo everything. It’s been long enough, let’s reset the clock, let’s start over.” I don’t know if I ever would have been ready for that, because the property is now so tainted by its ghoulish inventor. But if it simply had to happen, I’d have appreciated a longer gap. Maybe in my 60s I would have more readily greeted such a thing, said, “Oh look, it’s that again, so long after that writer’s yacht sank in the Aegean.” Now, though? Who is this for?