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The Magicians
2015 · TV series · 45 min episodes · 5 seasons
Created by Sera Gamble
Brakebills University is a secret institution specializing in magic. There, amidst an unorthodox education of spellcasting, a group of twenty-something friends soon discover that a magical fantasy world they read about as children is all too real— and poses grave danger to humanity.
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12 comments on Hacker News
Swear I recognized location/trees from TV show The Magicians in the latest adaptation of Shogun(standing in for Japan).
Damn I had noticed a lot of series doing it, but I guess it's wider than I thought!
The Magicians overdid it though. It's not a musical episode, iirc it's like 2 seasons
Edit: just to be clear, I still watched those 2 entire seasons, because the story is genuinely that good, plus I was invested. But I really wish they hadn't gone musical, it really messed with the mood of the series.
It's a whole thing. The Magicians was just following a trend that genre shows need a musical episode if they've been on long enough. https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MusicalEpisode
Agreed I loved it! Right up until they turned it into a musical for some reason. Me and my wife call it "doing a magicians" when a TV show suddenly starts singing for no reason.
But yeah up until that point it was great!
oh thanks, I'll check that out!
BTW, The Magicians TV series might be the best thing SyFy ever made. It's got so much heart, it's properly funny, it's creative, it's epic despite a shoestring budget, and the characters stay with you long after you finish.
Exactly. If someone pitched you a book about a young kid who goes to a school of magic to learn how to use his powers, makes friends and enemies and ultimately battles evil, you might shoot down their dreams because "some cocaine-addled sales critter" already had that idea, and she's called J K Rowling and she's worth billions and shes so successful she can't even be cancelled because she makes so much money.
And yet, Patrick Rothfuss's The Name Of The Wind is the same concept, and sold over a million copes,
Lev Grossman's The Magicians is again the same concept, sold millions, and was adapted into a 5 season TV series for SyFy.
If anything, the success of an idea only leads to a bigger appetite for that idea.
Google was not the first search engine.
To be fair, The Magicians is magic college instead of magic grade school, but it's more common in literary magic systems for the child to discover magic after puberty, in which case magic high school might make more sense.
And are you really going to claim that the Olsens are normal?
When did Mickey Rooney start talking about how kids are treated in Hollywood? I'm surprised that at this point we have the ASPCA but no equivalent organization chaperoning kids on movie sets. Not only should this exist, but I think it should have an oversight board of former child actors. Foster, Barrymore and Feldman for instance would have a lot of hard questions to ask.
I hated The Magicians the first time, but I read it again once the tv show came out and I found it a lot better the second time. I just had to realize everyone in the book was supposed to be incredibly spoiled and bored assholes with barely any redeeming qualities. It showed the completely emptyness of life for people who can do pretty much everything, like youre playing a video game with cheats.
> Season two, which returned more than a year later with a significant marketing push and a solid lead-in, was down 24 percent among total viewers and averaged 457,000 total viewers. That compares more to similar returns for Syfy's inexpensive co-productions like Dark Matter and Killjoys, than to the cabler's original scripted series like The Magicians and Happy.
I'm a huge fan of both The Expanse and The Magicians, but if the above quote is true I can see where they're coming from. The Magicians is a far more accessible show than The Expanse, and if I have to decide where to stick marketing dollars I'm going to go with the show with the larger audience.
Also, although I love The Expanse, it is not nearly as compelling as BSG or Firefly. When BSG came out 14 years ago it was really a singular experience in terms of cable TV. I would say something like Westworld follows more in the footsteps of BSG than The Expanse. And Firefly tapped into the same energy as Guardians of the Galaxy but 15 years too early.
Overall, very sad but not surprised. At least the TV show got me reading the books...
I love the books, devour them as soon as they come out, and I think the show has done a fine job adapting the story.
I didn't love the books because too many of the sentences are weak, obvious, or clichés: https://jakeseliger.com/2016/04/28/briefly-noted-leviathan-wakes-james-s-a-corey , but I gave the show a shot and hoped for something better than what it is, or what the first few episodes showed. Still, I think the cash shortfall problem is probably real and accounts for some of the show's challenges.
I'm reminded of SyFy's making of The Magicians, which is a lovely book (https://jakeseliger.com/2009/08/28/the-magicians-lev-grossman/) and a TV show that I really wish HBO had made.
I'm actually really enjoying The Expanse and The Magicians (to the point where I bought one on Google Play and the other on iTunes). What's really cool is that I bought the current season up front and then get to watch the new episodes the day (or maybe day after?) they're released. I'm not sure if Syfy is the only channel doing that, but before these shows I was used to only being able to buy the season after it was released (e.g. Game of Thrones box set).
I'll have to check out Killjoys, given that you've put it between the two other shows that I enjoy. Thanks for the rec.
From the first episode of The Magicians, two students reason about being a brain in a vat:
Quentin: "Am I hallucinating?"
Elliot: "If you were, would asking me help?"
So, I either I don't understand Putnam's argument or it's plainly wrong.
I recognize that when we say "We are brains in the vat" it seems, at the surface, self-referentially false. Because if we are brains in a vat, we wouldn't have the experience of being brains in a vat--- we'd have the experience of walking around and being people. But I can make a statement like: "Despite my experiences, I think that I am a sentient being that is contained inside a vat."
His argument that the word "vat" refers to different things in "vat-English" and normal English doesn't matter. The concept held behind vat & brain are fundamental enough that they would be self-generating among a community of sentient beings. If we say: "I am a sentient meatcomputer inside a vase filled with liquid food" we may be saying something different, but we are still expressing the core idea.
Even though the simulated world might be vastly different than the host world, language allows abstractions such that we can make the statement.
Putnam goes on to entertain the idea of a twin earth where beeches and elmes are switched, or a world where water has a different chemical forumula than H2O. That is a better starting point, but it doesn't help. I can simply generalize my statement: "I am a sentient being experiencing a hallucination, and the brain which executes my thoughts are self-contained in an environment I cannot perceive, but which nurtures my brain while networking stimulus with it."
I'd like to add a thought experiment to this. Imagine you have two vastly different communities with vastly different chemistry, and possibly operating with more than 3space and 1time dimensions. What would happen if, by the act of an Angel, both communities were given the rules for chess?
The names of the pieces don't especially matter--- if one community never had a bishop, we can simply pick a different word. Or call it piece #4.
With enough games played and thought put into it, the communities would discover tactics. They would compare and contrast the Queen's Pawn vs King's pawn. They would figure out 3-move checkmate. They would understand why en passant was a good rule to be added. And despite have different words and names for all of these concepts, these concepts still refer to the same things. Even if one world played chess with stone pieces, and the other world used leashed rabbits with hats.
A great example of this is when I went to China and play Go (or Weiqi, as they call it). I spoke 10 words of mandarin, and they spoke zero english. I was able to play a couple of games without having any shared language about the game. In the second game, an older chinese guy would sometimes yell at me and move the stone I had just played--- essentially saying: "no, that's not the best move, HERE it is." I didn't always understand why it was the best move, but often it was plainly clear that I was incorrectly read the truth of the board.
So. The act of thought supersedes what we immediately refer to in language, by it's ability to abstract. boom!