Even as a genre fan, The Magicians compels me less for its supernatural side than its feel for the social alienation that makes fantasy so appealing in the first place.
Part of the fun of the series is how it challenges the idealized portraits of young heroes in fantasy literature with characters plagued by the same bad decisions, hormonally-charged emotions, and selfishness and pettiness of any college kid...
It would take a clairvoyant to know whether The Magicians will eventually develop into an agreeably dark and twisty piece of juicy genre fare, but at this early stage its future looks murky.
Magicians is just the latest attempt to conjure up something special. The new series is about a magical school for wizards, but it's not Harry Potter's Hogwarts. Not even close.
The television show, anxious and impatient, rushes through the bullet points of the book's plot and forgoes the emotional complexity that made the books more unique than just the Potter imitation they seem at first blush.
The result ends up feeling like a knock-off of the genre works that inspired Grossman, lacking in the wry commentary that made the original books feel so fresh.
