In the US: Mondays, 10/9c, Syfy. Starts January 25 2016
In the UK: Not yet acquired
From many points of view, most of them commercial, Harry Potter was a great franchise. It made it to seven books and eight movies for starters, which very few other franchises managed to achieve; it also managed to reach that end point without getting worse – in some ways it even got better – which is practically unique, unless you’re a dyed in the wool Fast and the Furious or Friday the 13th fan.
But it did finish, which is an obvious problem. It was also for kids and starred kids, who as well as appreciably getting older over time, precluded any possibility of sexy time except in the darkest, nastiest niches of Internet fan fiction. It was also about English people.
As such, The Magicians is an obvious attempt to fix all those issues while sticking as close to the Harry Potter template as possible. Based on the series of novels by Lev Grossman, it sees the daftly named Quentin Coldwater (Jason Ralph), a fantasy-book reading college graduate, discover that magic isn’t just tricks involving coins – it’s real.
As there’s a university that offers a postgraduate course in magic, he enrolls at this ‘Brakebills College for Magical Pedagogy’ to be trained as a magician and to maybe make sexy time with the witches. Unfortunately for Quentin, his childhood friend Julia (Stella Maeve from Golden Boy) flunks the entrance exam, so doesn’t make it to Brakebills. Instead, she gives up on her previous life, and instead goes searching for magic elsewhere.
Little does either Quentin or Julia know, however, that there’s an arch enemy no one will talk about at Brakebills who’s laid waste to a lot of the magic community, reducing the final year of pupils to a class of four. Is he related to the group that want to recruit Julia? Only time will tell…
Despite being an obvious Harry Potter knock-off with delusions of having subtext, The Magicians isn’t half that bad and bears more than a few similarities to Ursula Le Guin’s far superior to A Wizard of Earthsea that help to lift it. Unlike Potter, the story is at its worst at Brakebills, when it’s dealing with Quentin’s fellow pupils – they may all be graduate students but they still act like they’re in High School, and the show even gives us a 10 Things I Hate About You style introduction to all the campus’s various social groups. They’re all completely insufferable and Quentin’s not that much better, being as full of himself ‘pre incident’ (you’ll know what I mean when I watch it) as Le Guin’s Ged was before that night on Roke Knoll.
But when it’s dealing with both the real world and the darkest aspects of the magical world it’s conjuring, the show actually soars and the final few minutes of the first episode are genuinely disturbing and adult. It also clever enough to know its own heritage, with a ‘book within the book’ that’s clearly a Narnia knock-off, but like The Neverending Story, one that blurs into the ‘real world’ of the story.
If The Magicians can avoid its most Harry Potter-esque and its more ‘adult’ aspects in favour of its genuinely adult qualities, it could be a really good show. But I have a suspicion that it’s much more in love with its mean girls, cliques, nerds and sexy time party!! thoughts than with telling a seriously interesting story.
