Syfy

Syfy

Syfy

Syfy

Syfy

Syfy

Warning: This piece contains minor spoilers for The Magicians S1 and early S2.

The Magicians will sneak up on you. At first it might seem like a cheesy CW show about angst and magic at an exclusive East Coast college. But suddenly, it gets seriously twisted and frightening. Seemingly adolescent rivalries bleed into murder and erupt into cross-dimensional authoritarian regimes. There's a nasty, dark sense of humor nipping at the edges of the story. Perhaps most importantly, the characters are multi-layered, and their magic has real-world consequences. The Magicians' second season premiered last night on Syfy, but you've got plenty of time to catch up with the most interesting fantasy series on TV right now.

A book of lies

Based on Lev Grossman's bestselling series of novels, The Magicians sometimes gets compared to Harry Potter. It's about young people learning magic in school, and it centers on an unlikely group of friends/frenemies. But that's pretty much where the comparison should end. The series is creepy and messed up in ways that Harry Potter never is, and it also deals a lot more with the non-magical world. Main character Quentin (Jason Ralph) has been in and out of mental hospitals for depression, and he's spent far too much time obsessing over a series of Narnia-like fantasy novels about a magical land called Fillory. When he finds out that magic is real and that he's been accepted to a magical Ivy League school called Brakebills, Quentin basically soils the bed with glee.

But because this show takes a realistic approach to its themes, magic doesn't solve any of Quentin's problems. He's still depressed and awkward. He still alienates his best friend Julia (Stella Maeve), a powerful magician who becomes an off-the-reservation "hedge witch" after getting rejected from Brakebills. Quentin falls in with a new group of friends—alienated Penny (a show-stealing Arjun Gupta), gay party boy Eliot (Hale Appleman), mean girl Margo (Summer Bishil), and talented magic nerd Alice (Olivia Taylor Dudley)—but can't seem to fit in. Even among magicians, his Fillory obsession makes him kind of a loser. Until, that is, it turns out that Fillory is real and isn't exactly the happy place from the books Quentin loved.

Most of the first season is devoted to Quentin and his friends' struggle to stop a genuinely frightening, demonic creature from Fillory called the Beast. This isn't your standard bad guys versus good guys situation, because the Beast has a complex backstory involving a mystery about how the Fillory novels were written. And our heroes are often clueless and downright annoying. One of the pleasures of this series is how it plays with the idea that there's a difference between real-life magic and magic as it's portrayed in fantasy books. In real life, magic can be inelegant and messy.

Putting the Fillory novels at the center of the show also raises interesting questions about what it means to be a fan. Quentin's encyclopedic knowledge of Fillory may help his friends navigate the Beast's world, but it also leads to miserable failures. The problem is that Quentin only knows the sanitized version of Fillory, carefully packaged for eager young audiences by a man whose motivations are not as innocent as they first appear. Fannish expertise turns out to be a liability, because stories written for fans are basically lies.

Homework and existential threats

Our main characters' failures and mistakes feel cracklingly authentic, even when they involve transformations into animals or ill-advised group sex induced by soul removal. Learning magic at Brakebills is a slog that involves intense, Olympic-level physical training and a certain amount of psychological torment. Magicians cast spells by making specialized hand gestures and movements, which look both cool and legitimately hard. As the students master magic, there are the inevitable squabbles over love and homework, but there are also revelations about how adults mask their cruelty with magic and moving explorations of how violence begets violence. The show always maintains a perfect balance between college drama and existential threats.

Whenever things start getting too twee over at Brakebills, we switch perspectives to hedge witch Julia, who gets a hard life lesson in how outcast magicians live (and die). Without a college education, she can't do legit magic and she can't get a decent non-magical job either. Plus, it turns out that most of her fellow hedge witches are either talentless hacks or power-mad sadists. Unfortunately, when Julia at last finds peace, she unintentionally causes a catastrophe of epic proportions that spills over into season two.

I've watched the first four episodes of season two thanks to a sneak peek from Syfy, and the series only gets better. The Brakebills gang has become Fillory royalty, and there's a lot of worldbuilding in the fascinating/depressing land they now rule. We learn more about who the Beast really is, which involves a lot of show tunes. Characters' lives are wrecked permanently; people die for real; and gods do things like poop in magical wells and torture kittens. It's been a long time since I've watched a show that made me giggle at Dirty Dancing jokes in one scene and cover my eyes in abject horror during the next.

The Magicians' showrunner is former Supernatural producer and showrunner Sera Gamble, who has done an incredible job adapting Grossman's beloved books. Gamble worked on the earlier, better seasons of Supernatural (sorry, superfans) and brings along some of that show's sick jokes and pacing. The writing is often funny, but it's still dark and unsettling. It's sort of a cross between Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Game of Thrones.

What keeps me coming back for more Magicians, though, is how it never seems to fall into the tired tropes you'd expect. Instead of offering a reassuring message about how friendship and love conquer all, this show smacks you with unhappy truths about how innocence is always stained with corruption. The best part is that you'll enjoy the smack. Because The Magicians always delivers smart, twisted fun.

Season one of The Magicians is on Netflix; new episodes air on Syfy on Wednesday nights.

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