Lev Grossman’s The Magicians is the first of a trilogy that gets better and better with each book. It’s smart, referential fantasy for and about readers, with a main character who’s as obsessed with a series of books as any of us ever were with Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter or Narnia. Syfy’s adaptation of Grossman’s series officially starts with a two-episode premiere on January 25th, but a sneak peek of the first episode aired last night. Streamlined, aged up, and wasting no time getting to the action, The Magicians has a lot of promise.
Spoilers for the first episode (and some discussion of the books) follow.
While I don’t want to focus too much on what’s changed from the book, one structural change is key: Grossman sticks close to Quentin; we’re always in his head, hearing his thoughts (even when we might not want to know), and the show has to open that up. (Sort of like how The Hunger Games films had to get outside Katniss’s head, but here there’s a little less child death.) So we start somewhere else entirely: on a park bench, where a man waits for a woman. She’s late. He’s testy. She’s testier. She drops what looks like a strangely heavy moth into his lap and tells him, “It’s happening.” Something is coming. Some grownups know, and they don’t seem happy.
Quentin Coldwater is currently oblivious to all this, being engaged in getting out of a mental hospital. He checked himself in, and he wants to go home, even if home means hiding behind a red Solo cup at a party where no one appreciates his nerd minutiae. (In the real world, there are always people at parties who care about nerd minutiae, but not here, apparently.) Quentin retreats to his bedroom to comfort-read one of his beloved Fillory books, which neatly comes to life onscreen as he narrates the story of three Chatwin children—twins Martin and Rupert, and their older sister Jane—who went through a clock to a magical land. Fillory glows with warm sunlight; there are clocks in trees, and familiar giant moths settled in clusters on branches.
Fillory, like Narnia, or like a book, always kicks the adventuring children out when the story is done. Quentin just keeps going back to the books, again and again. But now he’s going to grow up, he tells his best friend, Julia (a perfectly prickly Stella Maeve), and sell his prized books on eBay. It’s all very symbolic, Quentin giving up on the stories that sustain him, accepting that in the real world he’s just another ordinary person, one without a heroic narrative or a magical secret.
Except, of course, he isn’t. Sort of.
When Julia walks him to a grad school interview the next day, everything changes, and not because the fellow who was supposed to interview him is dead (later, someone makes a snide crack about diabetics and Oreos that really should’ve been cut from the script). The paramedic who arrives is, oddly, the woman from the first scene, and she gives Quentin an envelope with a mysterious sixth Fillory book that isn’t supposed to exist. His excitement seems out of place to Julia, and they get into the kind of fight you only have with someone who loves you and knows you very well. She’s pissed at him for caring more about the book than the dead guy. He’s pissed she doesn’t still care about Fillory like she used to. She knows he was in the hospital. Again. They’re mean and perfect, and they’d be over it by the next day, if life—in the form of a magical college entrance exam—didn’t interfere.
Quentin is so prepared for this. He’s living a Fillory story, essentially: he stumbles through a tired garden and onto the sunny lawn of Brakebills University, where someone whisks him off to prove that he’s smart and magical, and then he’ll get to have lots of adventures and make new friends. It’s Fillory, except it’s also grad school (upgraded from plain old college in the books), so probably there’ll be a little more homework. But that’s ok. Quentin passes, egged on by Dean Fogg, the man from the first scene.
Julia fails, and is sent home, her memories supposedly wiped, though she’s too clever to let a little thing like a forgetting spell work on her. Quentin asks a few questions, then accepts everything, including Fogg’s suggestion that he hasn’t been depressed; he’s just been alone. Everyone medicates, out there in the real world, he says. “Here, we hope you won’t have to.”
The show is, wisely, vague about whether or not Quentin is actually depressed, and not just another human who wanted his life to be more meaningful than it felt. The hospital and the meds are there to illustrate Quentin’s mental state, and are probably a better tactic for that than, say, a voiceover about his feelings. But to make magic the cure for Quentin’s problems would be too tidy, to say the least. I don’t think it’s meant to be that simple, given that in this fictional world, magic isn’t always helpful and is often fairly deadly. (“Spellwork,” Quentin’s new friend Eliot says, “is not unlikely to murder you, and if so, oh well.”) The connection between unhappiness and magic is present in the books, but here it’s made tangible in a way that I’m not sure works—though I’m reserving judgment on that until we see how it plays out.
Brakebills is Hogwarts and the Ivy League and a glassy modern office building, bound up into a mishmash of clean, bright, airy rooms and cozy wood paneling. Quentin, who doesn’t get to do a lot of magic yet, is rather better at making friends with his fellow magic students than he was in the regular world, but his attempt to kiss up to brilliant, overachieving Alice gets him exactly nowhere—until he wakes up from a dream about Jane Chatwin with a weird symbol burned into his hand. It’s enough to make Alice take him seriously enough to involve him (and, through a bit of handy psychic eavesdropping, his surly roommate Penny and Penny’s girlfriend) in an elaborate summoning spell, the effects of which are not immediately apparent.
But what about Julia? Grossman doesn’t get to her story until book two, The Magician King, and one of the show’s smartest choices is to weave her narrative in with Quentin’s from the get-go. Back in Brooklyn, she’s been researching herself into a stupor, trying to find evidence that magic is real. Her boyfriend calls Quentin in for help, but he’s useless: he’s bought entirely into Brakebills mythology, and is certain the powers that be would know if Julia were really a magician. Her sparking fingers prove nothing. Quentin’s dismissal is extra cruel given that, just a few scenes before, all he wanted was for her to care about magic—real or imaginary—as much as he did.
And poor Julia’s night just gets worse: in the bathroom, her buttons start popping off, and her shirt attacks her. In walks a fellow from the bar who tried to chat her up. He’s smug and creepy and obviously using magic to harass her, and when she goes full-on glow-fingers to break free, he smirks, saying, “I just needed to see if I was right.” So, to recap: Quentin is given a position at a prestigious university with very little fuss or challenge, other than that Fogg yells at him for a minute; Julia is going to have to fight for a drop of power, and endure gendered humiliation to get it.
Not that Quentin’s time at Brakebills is going to be all flying cards and magical things to smoke. When he’s next in class, time stops, everyone freezes in place, and out of a mirror steps … someone. Someone with a lot of moths obscuring his face. Someone who does a little shuffling dance around the classroom before quickly and effortlessly dispatching two full-blown magicians. Someone who stops in front of Quentin, says his full name, and coos, “There you are.”
This is mostly a set-up episode, as premieres tend to be, and it’s a dirty tease, ending at a moment when it seems like no one should get out of that classroom unharmed. (It’s unfortunate that the moth effect goes a little wibbly just when it needs to work the most, when the stranger leans in front of Quentin.) But it’s much more focused than the book, which spends a good long (delightful) while wandering around campus, skipping over big chunks of Quentin’s first year and a half of school, and generally giving him a moment to enjoy himself before things go entirely sideways. The dropped hints and eerie dreams promise that something big and strange is going on without giving too much away; darkness slowly seeps in right from the beginning, even if Quentin is mostly oblivious. If the characters haven’t quite been fully established yet, the groundwork is there, and Julia and Quentin’s friendship, built over years and now deeply strained, is complicated in the right ways. And we don’t have to wait an entire season to see Julia’s witch training! Although as this episode’s underlying theme might be “Be careful what you wish for in your fantastic narrative, as it may come back to bite you in the throat,” I’ll try to keep my expectations in check.
Molly Templeton is sure she’s not good enough at math to get into Brakebills, but that wouldn’t stop her trying. You can find her trying to do spells on Twitter.
Just a quick nitpick, wasn’t Dean Fogg’s quote, “Everyone medicates?”
A short heads up. I’m from a workingclass background, and work at an oilrefinery, so to say that I have little in common with the characters of Lev Grossman would be an understatement. I cannot relate to them, and trying to do so feels like trying to learn quantum computing via semaphore But I think I’ll give this a look, to see if the characters will differ from the books. Because the books made me hate each and every one of them, and not in a good way. They were entitled, little shits that whined incessantly about getting what they always dreamed about, but it wasn’t quite what they’d imagined when they were babies. They reminded me of Martin Shkreli or that “affluenza” kid.
But, maybe, the tv-show won’t make me want to hurt everyone even remotely associated with it.
I hear he’s a well liked author, and this is just my take on it, if you manage to connect and empathize with these people, you are better human beings than me.
PS
They say that evoking emotions in your readers is the sign of a good author, then Lev Grossman is a genius, because to make me feel this much hate and loathing through the written medium takes skill.
@Curtis – you might be right. I’ve edited it. Thanks!
I’m unfamiliar with the books, so I’m coming in with a blank slate. It has potential, and it was reasonably entertaining, but it feels a bit too self-consciously “Oh, let’s deconstruct Harry Potter and Narnia by throwing in cussing and drugs and floaty sex and near-rape and other grown-up stuff.” (That’s two Syfy 10 PM premieres in three days that have had floaty sex scenes, the other being episode 1 of The Expanse.) I hope there’s more to it than that. The lead actor’s a little bland, though; I’m more interested in Julia at this point. And the actress playing Jane from the book is kind of terrible. Plus I’m disappointed that Rick Worthy didn’t make it past the pilot. He was excellent as Dean Fogg; he’s kind of matured into an American Colin Salmon. (Indeed, I almost thought he was Salmon for the first few moments, I guess because I’d more naturally expect an English actor in something like this.)
@thordur, I felt the same way about the first book which so many of my friends loved to death. I guess there’s people who are entertained by reading about awful people doing crappy things for no more complicated reason than that they want to, but I tend not to be one of them. It’s a weird disconnect for me, as I am okay with crappy people being interesting as they’re awful, like I was with The Shield, for example. But perhaps it was a class thing as well. Who knows.
But I found the second book notably more interesting, and Quentin’s failings much more relatable. If you saw the bones of something good in the first one I’d encourage you to pick up the second. I haven’t gotten to the third, but I found myself happy to have read the follow-up where the first one made me wish I’d spent my time elsewhere.
I haven’t read the novels so I’m coming to the series with an open mind. This sounds interesting.
@thordur – I read the first two books and felt the same about the characters with 2 exceptions. I had some positive feelings toward Alice in the first book and really liked Julia in the second. But the fate of both characters is rage inducing. I haven’t bothered with the third book yet, but haven’t completely written off reading it some day.
My opinion of the books has always been they are very good, but not enjoyable.
@Christopher … the floaty sex in both shows bothered me, from the perspective that someone at SyFy went … hey, here’s a cool F/X, let’s use it in our new shows! I probably wouldn’t have minded so much if they weren’t repeatedly airing the trailers back to back & making it so obvious.
@8/siliconivy: I didn’t see the impetus as “Hey, here’s a cool effect,” but as “Hey, let’s put in floaty sex scenes to drive home that we’re doing more adult SF/fantasy now.” They’re really committed to their rebranding and their attempt to recapture the glory days of Galactica. (Heck, near the start of the Childhood’s End miniseries, the young Milo was actually watching BSG on television.)
Personally, I’m worried that they’re going to get too dark and depressing. So far I’m not getting into The Expanse at all because it’s just too gritty and devoid of sympathetic characters. People tend to dismiss the value of the so-called “lighter” shows Syfy has done over the past decade, but I think they get a bum rap. Eureka and Warehouse 13 started out unevenly, and W13 ended even more unevenly, but they were both quite good in their prime, and being “light” didn’t mean they lacked substance or quality or moments of very effective tragedy. Having a mix of light and dark made both more meaningful. I really don’t want to see Syfy fall into the trap of thinking “Hey, none of our later shows were as popular as BSG, so let’s be as grim and violent and depressing as possible in everything we do.” Even BSG, at its best, had moments of humor and lightness and charm, and it was at its weakest when it forgot to include them. And there’s always room for light, fun shows alongside the darker, more solemn ones. Look at how successful The Flash and Supergirl have been.
But why did they change Janet’s name to Margo?
I guess I can live with some changes, though. If the series stuck to the books, at least 20 minutes an episode would be spent describing alcohol in excruciating (and pretentious) detail.
Haven’t read the books (though my wife has), and I loved the Oreo comment. I thought it worked as a great tie in to the real world.
@10/gaijin: Often, TV shows and movies change character names when they’re too similar to the name of a specific real person, in order to avoid any risk of defamation lawsuits or the like. For instance, the TV adaptation of The Dresden Files changed Chicago cop Karrin Murphy to Constanza “Connie” Murphy because there was a real Chicago cop named Karen Murphy. And Star Trek: Enterprise was going to call its captain Jackson Archer until their researchers learned there was only one Jackson Archer in the country. In cases like that, it’s better to choose a more generic name that isn’t associated with a specific individual.
Childhood’s End changed most of the characters’ first names. Rikki Stormgren became Ricky to Americanize it, but also Jan Rodricks became Milo Rodricks, Alexander Wainwright became Hugo Wainwright, George and Jean Greggson and their son Jeff became Jake and Amy Greggson and their son Tom, etc. It’s weird how pervasive it was.
@2Thordur
Your description of the characters in book one is pretty spot on. My own take on it is that tough as that book is due to this, that depiction was necessary for what’s to come. Book two is my favorite, but book three is quite strong and doesn’t miss by much, and I’d say this is one of the best written/constructed fantasy series. Which is a long way of saying a) you’re right and b) don’t let your being right prevent you from reading the next two (or at least giving them a shot)
Moving Julia’s story forward was a brilliant, and I’d say probably necessary choice. And I’ll be curious to see how far they go with the unlikable nature of the characters from Grossman’s first book.
As far as the grim part, these books do open up into some lightness (though they also get about as dark as possible). With regard to The Expanse, it seems they’re starting off rough with these characters, but there should eventually be a lot of light and warmth if they stay relatively faithful to the characters if not the story itself (and they should–slavish plot following rarely works, but messing with great characters and great character interaction isn’t a recipe for success either). I really hope they pick that up and not too far off or I think they’ll lose people.
I’m from a workingclass background, and work at an oilrefinery, so to say that I have little in common with the characters of Lev Grossman would be an understatement. I cannot relate to them, and trying to do so feels like trying to learn quantum computing via semaphore But I think I’ll give this a look, to see if the characters will differ from the books. Because the books made me hate each and every one of them, and not in a good way. They were entitled, little shits that whined incessantly about getting what they always dreamed about
Thordur: just to reassure you, this has nothing to do with your background, because I’m from an upper-middle class background and had an extremely privileged education, and I think they’re all whiny entitled little shits too. But I liked the books despite that, just because Grossman has such a good imagination.
@12/ChristopherLBennett
I get that, but Janet? That’s much more common than Margo without a T. Are they worried that Ms Jackson or Reno might think that the character is based on one of them?
I don’t have the stats, but I would imagine there are more Janets than Quentins or Eliots. I’ll concede there might be a real Janet Pluchinsky out there, but if so then changing just the last name or simply not mentioning it seems to make more sense.
@15/gaijin: As I said, it’s not about the first name in isolation, but the full name, as well as other distinguishing properties. There are plenty of Karens or Karrins in the world, and probably a fair number of them are named Murphy, but when the work you’re adapting has a Chicago cop named Karrin Murphy and there’s a real Chicago cop named Karen Murphy, then that’s a little too close for comfort.
Janet Pluchinsky sounds like a unique enough name that there may have been only one real person who had it. They could’ve changed either name, but it seems the usual preference is to change the first name. I’m not sure if there’s a reason for that. And of course I’m just speculating about this change, because I have no insider knowledge whatsoever about this show. All I know is that every TV or movie script goes through its studio’s legal department and every character, location, or business name is checked for possible conflicts, either with real things or with other fictional names. So there are a lot of reasons why a name might be changed.
Of course, sometimes a name just gets changed because the producers like a different name better, or find it easier to pronounce. Or maybe the character will be a composite of other characters. Or the name will be adjusted to fit the actor’s ethnicity if it differs from the character’s (e.g. the blonde Irish Karrin Murphy in the Dresden Files books became the Latina Constanza Murphy in the show). Or who knows why. I can’t give you an exhaustive list of all the reasons why character names are changed. All I can tell you is that it happens all the time.
I’d assumed the name change was just because there were too many ‘J’ women (Janet, Jane, Julia) and there’s a Buzzfeed article that suggest something similar. (I did google the name though and there is only one Janet Pluchinsky on Facebook (at least one accessible to public searching) so that may have something to do with it too.)
And I like the Julia actress and her story better than Quentin so far, also Alice looks a lot different than I pictured her.
@17/Chuk: Oh, good catch. Yeah, that seems like a probable reason for the change. I gather that Julia wasn’t a major character until the second book; was Janet in that book too, or not?
@11/Brian, yeah, the Oreo comment was great. Not sure what the article writer has against it.
@5 Don.
I’ve read the second book as well, and I must say that the main character is still a whiny little shit, whatever his actual age may be. Whatever he doesn’t have, must be better than his stuff, so he spends another book chasing something that, when he gets it, turns out to not be what he really wanted anyway. And, if I remember correctly, the intro to the third book shows him trying to get back to all he left behind in the second book.
As a tale about the dangers of getting exactly what you wish for without having earned it, these books are a solid ten, but they annoy the f*** out of me with the characters inability to learn anything, anything at all, from their experiences. I’d just like one of them to go: “Hang on guys, we did this before and it turned out to be extremely stupid. I mean, loss of lives and limbs stupid. Maybe we should try something else? Or appreciate what we’ve got and, you know, try to grow up?”
Thordur, I would concur with others that it has nothing to do with your class, or where you come from. I have spent years in the academic system and I think your assessment of the first book’s characters is dead spot on. I say, first book because I couldn’t even get to the end of it, as I found the characters so pathetic I couldn’t get to the end of the book. And life is way too short to waste on books with characters like these. I doubt I would waste my time on the TV series as well as I don’t want to risk throwing a rock through my screen. To those who loved the series, all the more power to you. Thank goodness there is enough great SF and fantasy out there to meet everyone’s need.
First, I had to force myself to finish the 1st book because the characters were so entitled and unlikable and as someone else mentioned, didn’t really seem to learn anything at all… but I forced myself to finish it because it was so LAUDED by everyone (and I’m a huge SF/Fantasy addict) and I thought maybe I just hadn’t gotten far enough into it. I had absolutely no intentions of reading any further in the series after I finished book 1. (Some people’s opinions above that book 2 gets better may just tempt me, but that temptation has been mitigated by @thordur ‘s 2nd comment @20 because I agree with everything he’s said in this discussion wholeheartedly).
That said, I was hoping the TV series is actually *better* than the book in that respect which is why I decided to watch it (normally that’s never something that occurs to me – I usually just hope they don’t eff things up too badly and if I’m lucky, do a good job of artistically visualizing some of the great sf/fantasy aspects on screen).
After seeing Ep 1 I’m a little skeptical as to that being the case because although the intro of the villain at the very end was a great scene (and I thought it interesting they used moths instead of a floating “branch” somehow always in his face (as a side note, was I the only one who immediately thought Colbert was making an obscure reference to The Magicians when I saw the title of a clip called “May The Branch Be Ever In Your Face” ???)) but getting back to the point of this long paragraph, Alice is MISCAST!
Here we have yet another “hot girl in glasses” as a stand in for a character that’s supposed to be a tiny and painfully shy prodigy (and although not supposed to be ugly by any means, definitely not a “hot girl in glasses” …as much as I love what Emma Watson did with Hermione in the HP movies, it still annoys me that they cast an adorable little girl and just crimped her hair in the first movie to make it a bit frizzy rather than casting someone who remotely fit the character’s description (which was integral to a large part of her being bullied so much over the years: she wasn’t just a smarty-pants, she was a completely unattractive smarty-pants). It’s not as if there’s a dearth of “hot girls” on this show as it stands…
(it’s such an incredibly irritating trope: glasses? ponytail/hair in her face? totally *not* the hot girl…oh, wait!!)
I remember reading a review of the books in a different publication. While I’ve read many different types of speculative fiction, the impression I came away with was “this isn’t for me.” Maybe the show can change that,