We previously reported that Lev Grossman’s The Magicians was coming to television, and we now have a network! SyFy announced the show prior to their upfront presentations earlier today.
Former Supernatural showrunner Sera Gamble and Lois and Clark writer/producer John McNamara are writing the script, and will executive produce the show along with Michael London. London, who produced The Illusionist and Sideways, had optioned Grossman’s novel after it was published in 2009, and originally set it up at Fox before it found a home at SyFy—where it will join other upcoming shows The Expanse, Ascension, 12 Monkeys, and presumably Helix.
The third book in Grossman’s trilogy, The Magician’s Land, is coming out in August, 2014, so get caught up before the show premieres!
Has anyone read these books? How much actual magic is there in the story?
Cool.
@1:There is quite a lot of magic in them.
Read the first two books. Kinda of a cross between Harry Potter/Lion,Witch,Wardrobe/Catcher in the Rye. Darker, more angsty. I really enjoyed the series. Not tons of magic, but a more realistic take on magic. Don’t screw this up, SyFy!
Great; now the Beast can haunt my nightmares all over again once he comes to live-action…
Yay! SyFy, please do it justice.
@quinne: Go read them! gogogo. That is, if you like sharply written, dark fantasy that is openly a mashup of several fantasy classics, and gloriously so.
@JasonP: LOADS of magic. Maybe time for a reread? But your synopsis was pretty spot on. I would include LOTR-esque quests, and ALL of Narnia as being influential, too, along with Potter, and, yeah, teen-angst-drama, like Catcher. Good call there.
@James2: Yes! The Beast was truly unnerving. Really did give me the chills. Great villain.
Hell and Yes!
I’m just worried that this gets the budget it deserves. TBF, it doesn’t need that much at first so perhaps it will earn its later seasons.
Still, pretty jazzed right now.
This is an awesome, awesome book series. Unlike anything I’ve read before. It’s a novel that asks the question that was never asked in fantasy before (and should have been): why does magic exist in the first place? The sequel has answers – and good ones. It’s one of those novels that alters your view on the entire field.
I hope SyFy does it justice. I enjoyed the first two books. The first is a little better IMO, but the second is really good also.
Spoilery stuff in white below…
The Beast will be really cool to see, but I can’t wait for the graduates having their demons installed.
I dunno… I liked the first one. I did. I just… the main character was a bit too much of a whiny bitch. There’s this underlying theme that in order to use magic you need an inherently unhappy personality, unable to reach fulfillment no matter how obsessively you train, memorize, or harm yourself… which is cool in a sort of depressing way. I’m all about feel-bad books (which is why I love KJ Parker and Robin Hobb), but this was less like watching a Lars von Trier movie and more like sitting through a marathon of HBO’s “Girls”. All the depressing elements comes from the characters’ inability to be decent individuals… I dunno… does it get less depressing as the series goes on?
@5, Yeah, the Beast scared the s*** out of me when I read the first book — and I’m in my late 20’s, too.
Really curious who’ll end up getting the part.
Alice was a great character and I wish the series was about her and not Quentin. Overall I felt the book were mediocre and disliked the “CS Lewis was a pedophile” angle Grossman shoved in there. Amazon has a rating of 3.3 stars on the book over 850 reviews, which sounds about right to me.
Funny story… I loaned The Magicians to my girlfriend after she finished and returned The Name of the Wind. When she returned it a week later, she gave me a dirty look and said, “Why on earth did you give me that? It was dreadful.”
I responded, “So you could properly appreciate how good Patrick Rothfuss is compared to his peers.” Then she smiled as I handed her The Wise Man’s Fear.
We lived happily ever after.
I read The Magicians, and absolutely hated the main character. I was rooting for him to die over the course of the book. I suppose that it evoked that kindof response in me is a credit to the writer, but I was actively angry when I finished it. The asshole lives at the end? No thank you.
Magicians, a gross menagerie of cliche and gratuity which while watching I find increasingly less reason to care about any of the characters. At least that’s how I have felt about it for the past 3 weeks.