The Magicians vs. The Magicians: How Does the New Syfy Show Stack Up Against the Books?

Last night, the first two episodes of Syfy’s The Magicians debuted, and the world was filled with sexy magic, angsty magic, and magical plot hooks. But if you were already a fan of the books, was it enough to get you pumped for the next episode? Here is my completely biased breakdown of the show—and what was changed from how things played out in Lev Grossman’s fantastic novels.
Full disclosure: I’m absolutely crazy for the series of books—The Magicians, The Magician King and The Magician’s Land—collective known as The Magician’s Trilogy. They speak to me in ways that are both intellectually satisfying and childishly embarrassing. These books read me as much as I read them. Plus, somewhere around the release of the second one, I became friends with the author, who has supported me and helped my own writing career in incalculable ways. He’s a top person, and I’m more than a little biased when it comes to discussing this TV adaptation. What that in mind, this isn’t a proper review of the first two episodes, so much as it is a breakdown of what’s the same and what’s different when compared to the books—and what’s working so far. 
SPOILER ALERT for the first two episodes of The Magicians and some elements from all three novels!
Premise:
If you’ve never read the books, here’s what’s going on: instead of going to Princeton or Yale, young, moody manchild Quentin Coldwater is admitted into a magical college called Brakebills. It’s located in upstate New York, but—like Hogwarts before it—is kept secret from the outside world. There aren’t any wands at Brakebills, and spells are taken pretty seriously. In the books, Quentin is obsessed with a fantasy series called Fillory and Further, a Narnia pastiche which is viewed as kid’s stuff by his peers both in and out of Brakebills—at least at first.
In the first episode, all of this is more or less the same, but with less set-up. Instead of being a little disaffected (as he is in the books) the Quentin of the TV show is in a legit mental hospital and on meds. In the novels, Quentin being moody is an important part of his character, whereas in the show it’s in capital letters: THIS GUY NEEDS SOMEWHERE TO BELONG. While a purist might find this a little annoying, for the most part, I think the approach works.
The age of the characters is different. I always got the impression Brakebills was a place for undergraduate magical studies, or a kind of mash-up of undergrad and grad school. Here, it really seems like everyone is like in their mid-20s rather than their late teens, so it’s definitely magic grad school. This is particularly true of Quentin and Julia. Making the characters a bit older actually works in the show’s favor, insofar as I’m not sure an audience familiar with Harry Potter would be down for another magic-centric narrative featuring teenagers of any stripe. In short: Quentin, Eliot, Julia, Penny, Alice, “Margo” (Janet in the books) and new character “Kady” all seem like adults. Young, stupid adults, to be sure, but that’s the point.
Plot & Characters:
Smartly, from the first episode—“Unauthorized Magic”—the show blends narrative elements from the first and second books simultaneously. Quentin’s childhood friend Julia is left behind at the start of the first book and doesn’t reappear until the end of that novel. Her backstory isn’tspelled out until The Magician King, which focuses nearly half its narrative on explaining what she went through after getting ditched by Quentin. But here, we’re immediately shown Julia’s POV as she’s unceremoniously barred from attending Brakebills after failing the entrance exam. Julia’s method for getting around a memory-wipe that was supposed to make her forget the whole endeavor is a little more dramatic in the show, but the point gets across: Julia feels rejected and abandoned by Quentin and the establishment of Brakebills, making her bitter, but also open to possibilities. It looks like Julia’s journey to becoming a hedge-witch will happen concurrently with Quentin and company’s studies at Brakebills.
In the second episode, “The Source of Magic,” Julia’s entrance into the catch-as-catch-can magical world of “hedge-witches” happens differently than in the books when she’s locked in a freezer with a corpse and hedge-witch who isn’t what she appears. In the books, Julia has to follow a series of weird Internet message boards to discover an elite and hidden group of witches, while here she finds herself in such a group accidentally (or at least, it seems that way so far). Julia is characterized as someone who often gets “blow drys,” making you think of her as a “basic” girl, whereas in the books you never really get that impression. Regardless, jumping back and forth between Julia having a hell of a time in dark weird places, and the Brakebills crew living it up and drinking and smoking provides a great contrast, and sets up nicely the way Julia will interact with them later in the story.
There’s also the new character, Kady, who doesn’t appear in the books at all, and serves a dual purpose in these first two episodes. In one way, she’s a pseudo foil/love interest to Penny, but by the end of the second episode, we also discover she’s a sort of double-agent; a Brakebills student who is also smuggling magical artifacts from the school to the hedge-witch group Julia’s been inducted into. Kady creates a great TV-show plot-hook (i.e., every week the audience will be asking, “what’s Kady’s deal?”) but also firmly connecting the action at Brakebills with the outside world. This is different from the books in all sorts of ways, but thematically it’s fine; because of differences in point-of-view between the mediums, sometimes you have to change the ways different narrative strands join up.
Another huge plot element from the books is the interweaving of the mythology of the Fillory novels into the “real” magical world. As in the novel, Quentin is lured into Brakebills by an incomplete manuscript which purports to be the sixth book in the series, meta-fictionally titled “The Magicians.” The joke—or double-bluff—of this plot point is that Quentin’s love of Fillory doesn’t lead him to Fillory, but instead Brakebills, a place for real magic. That is, until Fillory is (spoiler alert) revealed to also be real. The TV show plays with this notion almost immediately by giving Quentin dream-visions of Jane Chatwin, a “character” from the Fillory novels, but also a real person. Though this never happens in the books, in the second episode of the show, Quentin shows Alice an online video documentary about the Fillory novels and the “real life” Chatwin children upon which they were based. This documentary features a quick cameo from a “Fillory Scholar” named “Dev Fleischman,” played by none other than Lev Grossman.
Martin Chatwin also makes more than one appearance in these episodes, albeit under different guises. For the sake of keeping some mysteries a mystery for those who haven’t read the books, I won’t get too specific. Suffice to say, the Chatwins are a lynchpin in the story underwriting the Brakebills narrative, and they’re all set up in this first episode, even if it’s handled quickly.
While the character Josh is absent from the show (so far), the rest of the cast is spot-on from their counterparts on the page. Janet’s name has been changed to Margo (likely to avoid confusion with Julia), and, as Lev Grossman said on his own blog, the character of Penny on the show is “way more badass than the Penny of the books.” Alice is nervous know-it-all with a secret, as she should be, and Eliot is simply amazing. Eliot was one of my favorite characters in the books, and its so heartening to see him faithfully recreated onscreen. He’s perfectly judgmental, deliciously flamboyant, and sarcastic at all the right turns. I can’t wait to see what happens when he gets to Fillory.
Magic powers: On!
So far, the magic we’ve seen isn’t exactly on par with the kinds of things the characters can do in the books. When Quentin has to prove himself to Dean Fogg in the novel, he manages to pull a flaming sword out of a stack of coins. In the TV show, that’s relegated to Quentin creating a nifty house of cards, seemingly with telekinesis. The effect is pretty much the same, in terms of him acknowledging his power, though magical flying cards are probably a little more accessible for a TV audience than flaming swords. Still, let’s hope a flaming sword shows up at some point.
And yet, in the books, a lot of attention is paid to the way people position their fingers when they’re casting certain spells. This is referenced pretty heavily in the first episode of the show when Julia and Quentin meet up after having not seen each other for awhile. Julia is moving her fingers around in tortured, claw-like ways, which is totally contrasted from the more effortless skill with which the Brakebills students cast their spells. The sparks between Julia’s fingers are a direct adaptation of how her hasty magic differs from the “official” magic of Quentin and friends. This visual is a nice nod to the books, and a great visual representation of the ways the novels address the differences between formal and informal education. Whether it’s magic or creative writing, Grossman’s characters meditate a lot on what it means to do something the “right” way, and the show is honoring that. In the second episode, Julia discuses the unfairness of being excluded from Brakebills: “Either do magic or you can’t.” In an almost parallel conversation in the same episode, Margo tells Alice, “Magic doesn’t come from talent, it comes from pain.”
The big plot points in the first and second episodes deal heavily with an attack by a creature called “The Beast,” a six-fingered monster from “another world.” In the episode, Dean Fogg is seemingly mortally wounded in this attack, whereas he’s not quite so laid out in the books. Kady throws around some “battle magic,” which Quentin attempts to reproduce in the second episode. There’s a lot more of this action-adventure magic than in the books, probably because it’s super exciting to watch.
Totally worth your time:
Because Lev Grossman’s novels achieve the impossible—creating a situation where realistic young people take magic seriously—the temptation for the adaptation to lean into the cheese factor was probably really strong Luckily, the show, like the novels, builds an intentional down-trodden quality into the DNA of all the protagonists. The characters seem both confident in who they are, and yet utterly terrified and bewildered by the world at large. It’s very difficult to convince an audience that reoccurring characters in a fantasy TV show are also people you could encounter in real life, but so far, The Magicains, like its source material, is pulling it off. These characters are headed toward mysterious, dark and sometimes sexy conflicts, and first two episodes of “The Magicians” gives everyone—fan and non-fan alike—plenty to be excited for.
The Magicians is now happening on the Syfy channel. Stream the first episode here and the second episode here.