First, I understand the complaints about book 1. It was the weakest of the three, but I thought it got stronger as it went along. Books two and three were similar, but IMO, more quality even if the story might have expanded a bit.

As to the tv series, I think it's starting to catch its flow, but I have a filling Book 1 is going to be 2 seasons. While this is fine and there are enough activities, if they add some flavor, to fill out one it will be week. Season 2 would be super awesome but need to fill in lots of back story.

If book 1 isn't well received, book 2 is not going to get a season.

 

Spoiler

If anything happens to Elliot, I'm gonna punch a baby.

 

It is like telling eagle to fear heights!

I teach you to soar.

Yes?

Myakovsky <3

 

Myakovsky was the best character in series so far ,the show seems to be moving from college kids drama to more magical stuff which is in plus especially latest episodes stuff started getting serious.

Overall the series is actually pretty decent wich is pleasant suprise usally fantasy tv series tend to be utter crap

 

Yeah, I'm very happy with them getting so serious so fast. Unlike the meandering pace of the books, the show is really getting to the meat. Episode 8 made me sit up and take notice. Very good. The show might actually get a season 2.

 

It was already renewed for season 2 actually. Early last month.

 

Elliot still carrying the show for me.

Starting to get really irritated by Q's 'Fillery's supposed do be magical, no mean and scary, waah' shtick.

 

The show is still keeping decent and somewhat grim level, the opening of ep 11 really made go wtf ,although ep9 still wins in that department.
It was also nice to see more magic in action ("Majikku misairu." lol)
and the ending

Spoiler

Quentin ending up in threesome with Elliot and Margo

so we can expect return of more romance drama which gets kinda mixed reaction of me.

 

It's a pretty solid reaction from me.

Fuck that shit.

 

I'm enjoying the glitter. Haven't read the books, but armed with the understanding that these are about fundamentally entitled, unlikable tropes characters painfully growing up, I like. I like the pain and suffering, the mental issues, the utterly human fuckups in this magical crockpot. I like the modern tonality, the pop references that read like meta-humor, just generally how these characters interact with the setting while forgiving their various neuroticisms.

Or rather, enjoying the consequences because of their neuroticisms.

Characters. Eliot carries the day as the party king, and also as one of the most layered, individualistic gay characters I've ever seen. So not token/archetypical. Hale delivers impeccably and with a pretty good range. His combination wardrobe's also pretty awesome, extremely well-thought out, if not of my taste.

Margo is best when she's sporty. Summer Bishil sounds completely monotone in earnest and in cadence, which is her only delivery as queen. It grates. So yea, I know fans enjoy her blatant strong!woman archetype, but I liked her much better in season 1 than season 2. Case in point: in an interview for Lesser Evil, Hale mentions Summer's musical close-up as intended of a powerful woman "belting it out." Except, when I hear it, her phonemes are all blended together. She might have had volume but there's no enunciation; no emphasis or personality or power.

One redditor commented, way early into S1, that most of the actors would benefit from elocution lessons. He wasn't wrong. Julia suffers from a similar vocal issue, although I think Stella's been improving in her nuance, and of course there's a lot more personal journey and authentic sense of progress (by dint of what's been forced) on her end than Margo's. To my ears and eyes anyway.

Jason is perfectly fine as ultra-nerd Quentin. I can forgive him his wussy pathetic fixations-in-the-moment.

Alice, while I understand is nothing like the book character and spends most of S1 as the archetypically alienated glamour girl-with-glasses, grows. As with Julia, I can appreciate the changes wrought on her from her journey. And yea, I can't help but be intrinsically vested in her and Quentin's story because it's fun watching Q struggle with romance. Looking forward to more Alice-Julia action as S3 rolls along.

Fogg's fun, Mayakovsky's best.

Arcwise, the show's not the most consistent. S2 felt much more experimentally meandering than S1. I lost sense of pace with S2, and I understand book fans were displeased with some of the plot deviations - what with Eliot's alternating highs and lows instead of a consistently mature upward trajectory as king; Penny's various arcs about his hands, etc. Again, not having read the books, I can forgive and enjoy the series for its best moments. Most of all, I'm delighted by the textures and postmodern playfulness inherent to this TV world, shallow as it might be.

I expect the books to be their own experience: not all unpleasantness is without profit.

FYI, The Magicians is Syfy's #1 for female viewers, topping even The Expanse. It's not going away anytime soon.

 

Just finished season three of The Magicians and riding out the glow. If season two was uneven in the way sequels tend to be, season three hit it out of the ballpark as it pretty much wholly deviated from the book.

The quest of the keys gave the screenwriters ample space to take the show to places that played to the ensemble structure of TV and explore the characters on completely new stages, in continuity to previous themes but in ways that would've been constricted by a faithful telling. Julia's journey, Josh [joining the main team as he was originally in the books], the keys themselves, all merely structural vehicles for full-throated creativity.

I could be more critical. A few narrative devices fell flat and characters were, in the end, a bit unreasonably jerked around by plot. Acting issues that bugged me from earlier seasons would bug me still if I'd unduly focused on them. The finale was a downer, as having to set up for the next season flipped the script on a strong season three.

But still. Taking storytelling into completely original territory was the right decision. I can't deny that it was, overall, shitloads of fun.

 

Does Quentin ever stop being a bitch? I watched to end of first season and didn't care for the protagonists.

 

So this seems to be a minority view on this site, but I actually like Quentin's character and The Magicians as a whole, but that may be because when I read the books I really connected/empathized with his desire for the world to be something it isn't and his issues with depression.

I think Quentin comes off less whiny (this seems to be the major complaint about his character, but it's never grated on me tbh) in The Magician's Land. He's matured, he's near the end of his Fillory & Brakebills adventure and he starts to have a more optimistic view on the things that bummed him out at the start of The Magicians.

The show is good too. One thing I liked about that adaption is that Eliot and Q's relationship is done well, especially the "Life in a Day" episode. And as Zombie mentioned in another thread, in the season 4 finale, Q shows some serious growth.

 

I liked the idea of the show telling Quentin's and Julia's storylines in parallel though instead of waiting to tell her story in the second season. I didn't like the second book as much partly for this reason.

A couple failings of the show appear with Julia's character and storyline and this sort of gets to your disliking of her character I think: 1) she's overly edgy; 2) she seems to move across Fillory, Brakebills, and NY so easily.

1) the edginess is fine for the show. they want it to be more adult. Fine. But at times this can be a bit corny. Julia's character is a prime example of this. She doesn't care about anyone else, she double-crosses the Brakebills gang for her deal with Martin, etc. But it makes her more unlikeable in the end bc. this sort of thing happens again and again with her. She never seems cognizant of or repentant for attracting the gods' attention & ire either. Even with Eliot being possessed this last season, there was a sense of stakes, vulnerability, etc. for the monster (it was tortured, had a sister) in addition to Eliot.

2) They did a disservice to her character by making the hedge-witch scene so permeable with Brakebills. I thought the uber-secret safe house in France was kind of cool in The Magician King especially since it shows how hard it was for her to claw her way out of the safe house scene in NY, but instead she just rips off books/spells through her contacts.

 

Yeah I was kind of disappointed about the way they handled Margo's desert scene last season. I usually like the musical numbers, so that didn't bother me so much, but it was just treated so ironically and Margo didn't seem changed at the end of it at all. In Magician's Land when Janet reveals her experience in the desert to Eliot, it's very sobering and revelatory of how vulnerable she actually is.

I was also bummed that Josh's character is diminished from the big oafy but genuine guy he is in the books to his relatively minor role as STI-lycanthrope and chef in the show.