The Magicians series mini review

[fazool]

I am a huge fantasy genre fan.

I think it was Yahoo trying to grab some entertainment share and offering to stream this cable series.

Well, it looked intriguing and I started watching the pilot.

I read that the series is based on Lev Grossman's "best-selling" books, which I've never heard of.

The half of an episode I saw (the pilot setting up the story) was such a blatant ripoff that I couldn't finish watching it.

Young boy, a misfit, has a friend who is a girl. She is smarter than him and much more serious, getting frustrated when the boy is being a fool. They both get recruited to join a secret magician's school that is kept hidden from the rest of the world. OK, you could not be any more "Harry Potter" than that. The character even reminded me of HP.

Well, along the way they find a big wooden piece of furniture. They open the door and step inside it and step through into a magical world. The door opened up into a pine forest, in winter. OK, you couldn't have copied "The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe" more exactly if you tried.

Such a total rip off I can't believe the show made it on the air. I fast-forwarded from there, to see if it got better. It didn't.

If anyone has been out of circulation they might not know the Harry Potter story (only the best selling book in the history of mankind) and possibly never read TLTWATW, they might think this is a clever show. It's not.

[Explorer]

I haven't seen the series, but I enjoyed the books tremendously.

The Harry Potter books are a young adult series. The Magicians trilogy are definitely adult books.

[Bikewer]

We are enjoying this a great deal. As noted, this is a very adult series, very dark. The only relationship I can see to the Potter stories is that they both deal with magic and a "school" sorts.
But it's a very different sort of school... Think "graduate school for magicians"

The villian (if that's truly what he is) is genuinely scary.

[ewalling]

Has this appeared on Netflix yet? Seems like the kind of thing my wife and I might enjoy.

[dirkronk]

It's on SyFy here in south Texas. My wife and I are watching, and yes...I do get elements of both Harry Potter and Lion/Witch/Wardrobe stuff (especially the latter, I'd say), though not enough to put me off. Yet. We've seen three, maybe four episodes and, unless it gets unbearable quickly, we'll probably give it a few more before we decide whether to jettison the series or not.

Dirk

[TBman]

Ah, my first resurrection of a Zombie thread, lol. I've been binge watching this on Netflix. Except for the useless sex scenes it's not bad.

[srick]

Barry - The book was much better - and in the book, the sex scenes made sense. The characters in the book are disaffected teens and young adults who have found no path in the world; eventually, discovering each other. The books are not even close to Harry Potter.

best,

Rick

[Bikewer]

Later episodes, in season two, have diverged a great deal from Grossman’s books.
However, the series remains inventive, funny, and rather adult. I like “quirky” series... Another favorite is “Preacher” (another comic-based offering)

We don’t get season 3 till next year.

[Dog Shape Cloud]

The original book, The Magicians, is a quirky and self-aware story with some missteps but overall quite fun. Explicit nods to Harry Potter and Narnia are part of the charm, not a ripoff, and for better or worse it's an element of a certain contemporary style (like Stephen King showing up as a character in one of the later volumes of his Dark Tower series, where protagonists also encounter Harry Potter-themed scenarios).

Books 2 and 3 of The Magicians are also readable but a bit weaker, they kind of drag towards the end.

Season 1 of The Magicians on TV is mediocre and more or less an adaptation of the first book. Season 2, which diverges substantially from the original plot, is quite good. Season 3, which no longer seems to have anything to do with the books, is superb.