Syfy’s New Series ‘The Magicians’ Fails To Cast A Clear Spell
Quick, name the series: A hidden school for magicians-in-training; a smart, geeky teen with issues learns he is a magic-user when he’s selected to attend the magic school, and who may be some kind of Chosen One; hyper-competent female magic-user with a chip on her shoulder; personality conflicts among students, challenges with magic classes, and a faceless evil antagonist bent on killing the young heroes.
It’s understandable if you immediately said Harry Potter. But in this case, the series is The Magicians, which debuted this week on Syfy. Critics and readers have pointed out the similarities between the books since The Magicians was published in 2009 by author by Lev Grossman.
Beyond the strong semblance to J.K. Rowling’s modern fairy tale series, The Magicians draws heavily on The Chronicles of Narnia. Central to The Magicians is a beloved series of children’s books called Fillory and Further. The Fillory stories feature English schoolchildren who find a magic portal to a fairy-tale land, help the locals fight evil, and learn important life lessons.
Fortunately, Grossman uses the Harry Potter and Narnia books not as a crutch, but as a stalking horse: by giving readers touchstones they know intimately, he was able to reframe the themes of these classics — alienation, love, friendship, redemption — into a modern urban fantasy. He also filled it with explicit adult themes: sex, drugs, homesexuality, betrayal, disappointment and a thoroughly modern despair.
Syfy’s adaptation tries hard to capture the elements that made the book unique: the wonder of discovering that magic is real, the shame of failure, the agony of betrayal, and the despair of finding out that what you’ve always wanted isn’t enough. Unfortunately, rushed pacing and disjointed scene construction largely derail that effort.
In episode 1, “Unauthorized Magic,” we meet Quentin Coldwater, a depressed “super nerd” preparing to start his master’s degree. Why he’s depressed is never made clear. His best friend, Julia, is as intelligent as Quentin but less socially akward. They are both unexpectedly given an entrance exam to Brakebill’s Academy of Magic. When pushed hard, Quentin produces genuine magic; he’s offered a place at Brakebills. Julia doesn’t, and her memory of the exam and the school are erased before being sent home. Once Quentin starts school, he meets fellow students Eliot, Margo, and Alice, all of whom will play important parts later in the series, as well as Penny, who immediately becomes his antagonist. The final scene packs a major punch, introducing The Bad Guy and setting events in motion that ripple through the rest of the series.
While the acting is fairly solid, and the pilot does a fair job of introducing characters, settings and relationships, the episode feels glossed-over and rushed. Important events whiz past with little preface or explanation. There’s no sense of time passing, of students forming relationships or learning magic; their relationships and their ability to perform complex, difficult spells simply exists. Scenes feel thrown together with little flow. It prevents the story from growing organically. Excessive commercials breaks hurt the episode’s flow as well. Air time is 75 minutes, but run time is 50 minutes, so Syfy crammed in an extra helping of ads, seemingly with little care for how it affected pacing. I constantly felt pulled out of the story.
In the book, students had plenty of sex; sometimes for love, sometimes when bored or drunk, occasionally out of spite, but it always felt organic to the story. Syfy understandably has to dial that down, but the episode’s sex scenes feel both gratuitous and a little silly. A couple — both wearing pants — floats off the bed, surrounded by every item in the room floating with them. In another scene, Julia’s blouse is magically ripped off and used to tie her to a bathroom radiator. Neither event happened in the book, and Julia’s near-rape feels forced and out of place.
The highlight of the episode is the final scene. It’s a major turning point in the story, introducing the main antagonist, the creepy yet genteel Beast. The meeting creates deep rifts among the students and setting up the mystery of the Beast’s identity and how to defeat him.
Adapting The Magicians was always going to be difficult. The early part of the story is largely internal, and existential angst doesn’t translate well on TV. The adult themes prevalent in the book had to be downplayed for basic cable. Downplaying those essential themes makes it impossible not to wonder how HBO would have developed The Magicians. With a limited budget and a 12-episode order, it isn’t surprising that showrunners would compress events and eliminate time-consuming classroom scenes, but it resulted in a rushed, uneven show. While the first episode was disappointing, upcoming episodes look more promising, as the focus shifts to a more action-and-adventure phase of the story. Fingers crossed that Syfy turns the rest of The Magicians to TV magic.
Episode 1, ‘Unauthorized Magic’: C+
