Just in time for the important wizarding holiday of Halloween, a new Harry Potter web series about Lily Evans is hitting YouTube.

Lily Evans and the Eleventh Hour is a short tale about a turning point in Lily Evans’s (Amanda Taylor) life, set during her sixth year at Hogwarts. It explores her friendship with Alice Fawley-to-be-Longbottom (Camrey Bagley Fox), Remus Lupin (Aaron Kahng), her evolving relationship with James Potter (Jon Rose), and her feelings about joining the official fight against You-Know-Who.

The web series will be a trilogy, and the first part is already available to watch. Part Two will be released on October 29^th, and Part Three will arrive (fittingly) on Halloween.

We think this is a great idea, because out of the Marauders’ generation, Lily is the character who needs the most fleshing out. The creator, Amanda Taylor, told us that, “The intention was to focus on the two women [Lily and Alice], since there are no Official Harry Potter stories with female main characters, and we wanted to show their relationship as well.”

The choice of time period is a good one as well. Lily’s sixth year must have been quite turbulent, between Voldemort growing ever more powerful, and her no longer being friends with Snape (an intentional choice, otherwise Snape/Lily would overshadow everything as it so often does). Amanda said, “We wanted to show that lines were being drawn, even for these teenagers, and their relationships are evolving.”  We see the beginnings of civility between Lily and James, but the romance isn’t quite there yet.

The web series is being praised in the YouTube comments for its quality of the set and the props – it really does look like Hogwarts. The casting is spot-on, especially Jon  Rose, who looks exactly like how we pictured James Potter.

As Ollivander would say, “I think we can expect great things from you.” The company behind the series, Apple Juice Productions, is a group of geeky women producing all kinds of content, whether it be a web series about fangirls based on Jane Austen, or just videos talking about geeky stuff. Be prepared to go down the YouTube rabbit hole!

As the enthusiastic response to Severus Snape and the Marauders proved, Potter fans are hungry for Marauder-era stories. Since that seems to be the one corner of the wizarding world Rowling is not interested in exploring further, fans have been picking up the slack, first through fanfiction, but now increasingly through fan films.

Are you eager to consume more stories about Lily’s generation? And what did you think of Part One of Lily Evans and the Eleventh Hour?