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neitherlandslibrary · 6 years

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If You’re Not Watching “The Magicians” At This Point, You’re Missing Out On Something Great

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When it comes to the shows that hog all the attention in our era of peak TV, The Magicians is nowhere near the top of the list. Mainstream conversations about fantasy TV are often limited to the wild success of Game of Thrones, and The Magicians is nestled into an underrated corner of TV on the Syfy network. It’s easy for any series to get a little buried when there are 500+ shows and the Stark family around. But if we’re judging on ambition and inventiveness, The Magicians is one of the most notable shows on television — and its third season, which wraps up this week, proved that point over and over again. It’s a show that plays with story convention so consistently it blows up any boundaries that might hold it back.

Technically, The Magicians is built on the familiar. Based on Lev Grossman’s book series of the same name, the show began in 2015 as a sort of advanced-age Harry Potter meets Chronicles of Narnia. Unlike Hogwarts, the Magicians’ magic school — Brakebills — serves grad school students instead of children. When the characters discover and eventually become kings and queens of Fillory, their own version of Narnia, the escapist world operates as a Technicolor meditation on what it means to embrace adult responsibility. The series is also a direct descendant of Buffy the Vampire Slayer: It follows a group of ragtag young people as they repeatedly try to save the world. The characters fight through depression, sexual assault, addiction, and the general sense that things may never get easier. That’s all classic, well-trod territory. Which makes it all the more impressive that The Magicians inspires the feeling that it’s doing it all for the first time.

Here are just a few of the elements that make it stand out.

It’s one of the best ensemble shows about a group of twentysomethings.

From left: Stella Maeve as Julia, Olivia Taylor Dudley as Alice, Appleman as Eliot, Bishil as Margo, Jason Ralph as Quentin, and Arjun Gupta as Penny in a promotional shot for The Magicians.

The Magicians has always had a stellar cast of characters on its side — a group of friends brought together via Brakebills and overlapping heroes’ journeys. They’ve fought moth-faced villains and conquered gods, each character an integral part of a larger and pretty magnificent whole. Eliot (Hale Appleman) has a palpable regality in both his look and his soul; Margo (Summer Bishil) has blossomed as a brazen queen; Quentin (Jason Ralph) is steadfast and earnest, buoyed by Ralph’s deep pleasantness, an energy that’s completely transformed the character from what he was in the books. And that’s only the tip of the iceberg — Julia (Stella Maeve), Penny (Arjun Gupta), Alice (Olivia Taylor Dudley), Kady (Jade Tailor), and Josh (Trevor Einhorn) are all worthy of their own odes. In a strange way, through them, The Magicians sits right alongside Insecure, New Girl, and Girls — it’s a sexy ensemble show about a twentysomething friend group. They muse on responsibility and the big life decisions you’re forced to make as you become a true grownup. They just do so while having hoversex, battling literal manifestations of their depression, and trying to run a kingdom or two.

And it has the kind of diversity that so many of the shows it riffs on lacked.

Beloved as Buffy may have been, it was also notoriously white. The Magicians, on the other hand, very much lives in a socially conscious 2018. A significant portion of its main cast is made up of people of color. Not only that, but every single one of them — from Maeve’s Julia, to Gupta’s Penny, to Bishil’s Margo — is the kind of complex, specific character you won’t find anywhere else on television.

A sizable portion of the characters also appears to be sexually fluid. Quentin, who on most shows would be the straightest white man on the planet, has a threesome with a man and a woman. He hooks up again with that same man in a later episode. There are no coming-out storylines, no hemming and hawing about labels — intimacies just happen to manifest in all types of ways on this show. On the one hand, there are always downsides to a lack of labels, including perpetuating the erasure of orientations like bisexuality. On the other, it’s kind of freeing to watch a show where it’s genuinely possible that anyone could sleep with anyone else and everyone treats that pretty casually. It goes well with part of what makes The Magicians so fun to watch: It actually does feel like anything could happen. The story options are wide open when everyone’s at least a little bit queer.

The Magicians’ third season has also heavily featured Candis Cayne, a trans actor who previously broke ground with her role on Dirty Sexy Money — the first time a trans actor had a recurring role playing a trans character on primetime television. Here, she plays the Fairy Queen, an intimidating force and a standout of the season. Another standout: Marlee Matlin’s Harriet — a deaf actor playing a deaf character who gets a beautiful moment in the spotlight with Season 3’s “Six Short Stories About Magic.”

What’s more, most of the show’s inclusivity goes unremarked upon on the show itself. Race, gender, and disability aren’t invisible to any of the core characters, but neither are they the focus. Characters will call out white supremacy and sexism without the show bragging about having a queen (and king!) of a magical realm be played by an actor of Mexican, Indian, and European heritage. Or a black man as the king of their neighboring kingdom. Or a mixed Native American woman on the path to becoming a goddess. And so on. Which is not to say The Magicians shouldn’t brag — if they want to spend all of Season 4 bragging about their magnificent ensemble, that would work too.

The show has a true sense of playfulness.

When Buffy aired its iconic musical episode in 2001, it had a ripple effect. Scrubs, Grey’s Anatomy, Psych, That ’70s Show, and even 7th Heaven all turned themselves into musicals for an episode. The Magicians, for its part, has been following in those same footsteps since its first season. Only instead of just one designated episode, they’ve peppered musical numbers into every season so far. In Season 1, Quentin sang Taylor Swift’s “Shake It Off” while trying to break out of a spell that had him trapped in a psychiatric hospital. “One Day More” from Les Misérables made a magnificent appearance in Season 2, as Eliot prepared for a duel to save his kingdom. (That one resembled what Game of Thrones might look like if Game of Thrones liked to party.) And this season, The Magicians did finally designate a full episode to several numbers. It culminated in the show’s main ensemble joining together in a rousing rendition of “Under Pressure.”

Integrated throughout the show, these moments stand as a declaration: This is just what The Magicians is, at its core. These scenes aren’t just an aside, a whim to break through the mundanity for a single episode — though The Magicians is also very good at that. With this show, narrative is twisted like a rubber band and then flung across the room. This is a series where talking sloths serve as top political advisers, party gods get banned from Instagram for posting too many shots of nipples, and messenger rabbits say things like “eat my ass.” It’s a blast.

And the fun they have with the story will also punch you in the heart (in a good way).

Wrapped up in all of its magical elements, The Magicians also happens to be wildly convoluted. Here, though, it’s at least in a way the show seems to truly delight in. As things grew more complex in Season 3, every week felt like the writers were taking the series’ classic fantasy tropes and conducting science experiments on them. Sometimes the effect is that aforementioned playfulness. But their characters are still on a variety of heroes’ journeys — which means this show is also willing to rip your heart out and tap dance all over it. Honestly? It feels great.

If there was one shining highlight of the season — and the show overall — it was the Feb. 7 episode, “A Life in the Day.” In it, Quentin and Eliot are tasked with completing a mosaic puzzle as part of a season-long quest to bring magic back to their world. To do so, they have to travel to a past version of Fillory. But unable to leave until they complete their mission, they wind up staying in the immediate vicinity of that puzzle for…well, the entire rest of their lives. The show plays this out in an extended montage. The two grow restless. They fight, they bond. They hook up. Quentin meets a local girl, settles down, has a son. When she’s gone, Quentin and Eliot spend the rest of their lives raising the kid and growing old together. Like the opening montage of Up, it’s the kind of sequence that really hits you with everything that it means to be human. It stays with you.

By the end of the episode, Quentin and Eliot had completed the puzzle and found their way back to their youths and their usual timeline. But the show made sure the impact of their time together was felt. These two characters had lived out an entire life as loving partners, side by side. It was an emotional beat that packed a hell of a wallop, and payoff has been sprinkled through the episodes that have followed. Sometimes it’s in small asides between the two characters; sometimes it’s just in knowing the way they look at each other. It’s hardly the first time characters in a genre show have lived out their entire lives in a separate timeline. But “A Life in the Day” was indicative of what The Magicians does best: It uses its magical setting and all-star cast to mold itself into different forms. Sometimes, like in that episode, it knocks you off your feet in the process.

In another episode, called “Six Short Stories About Magic,” the narrative is split into six vignettes sorted by character. The final one is centered on Harriet, a freedom of information activist and magician who runs a BuzzFeed spoof called FuzzBeat (hi, guys!). As Harriet is deaf, 10 minutes of the episode take place in silence. The segment includes some long-awaited exposition into Harriet’s backstory, which we get through her perspective before the series explodes back into sound in its final moments. The effect is stirring.

In “Be the Penny,” we get another play on perspective as Penny finds himself separated from his body with his friends believing him dead. We spend the episode with his astral self, watching people react to his death as he tries desperately to contact them. In both of these, the show plays with form to reveal depth. Penny doesn’t get a normal death, so it follows that the episode focusing on that would be just as off-kilter as the story itself — and just as sad. Penny watches his friends grieve, though not always to his satisfaction, and he can’t reach them to tell them that he’s still there.

This kind of experimentation is not new to fantasy. Supernatural, in its seemingly 500th year on television, has employed practically every genre and meta twist there is. Most recently, the characters crossed over with Scooby Doo and literally became animated. And Buffy was groundbreaking in this field before that, not only for the aforementioned musical episode but also for forays into silent filmmaking with “Hush” and character experiments like “Tabula Rasa.” One of the joys of sci-fi and fantasy is that it gives you a built-in excuse to fuck with convention. The Magicians has reveled in that from day one — and from the ground up. And with this third season, it took itself to a whole new and thrilling level.

#the magicians #the magicians spoilers #info: interview

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do-you-have-a-flag · 7 years

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I got star trek thoughts because Discovery premiered and you’re gonna hear ‘em

firstly: Klingon redesigns

Klingons were retcons once already because the blackface of the original series where they had embarrassingly orientalist visual traits mixed with them being stand ins for russia in a cold war scenario became less relevant over time.

Then we had the more prosthetic heavy look which caused the current controversy. It is a make up skin tone decision which looks fine when someone like Michael Dorn is playing a klingon, but not so much when it’s someone like Christopher Lloyd in the costume. the vaguely east asian cliche appearances with russian political position qualities were replaced by even darker complexions and culturally based on cliche japanese samurai and vikings as their primary qualities and the political metaphors were more general as only became specific as needed for individual episodes.

The makeup required has always involved racial coding separate from the cultural and political coding of klingons. So YES in 2017 there should be more considered casting of these roles to avoid blackface. but also as far as the first two episodes are concerned there are new elements of cultural and political coding happening.

The Klingon are given a more spiritual focus, there was already an increased focus on ritual with them in various series but here it is used to motivate the plot. The spiritual aspect however more closely resembles a simplified idea of ancient egyptian culture than viking culture visually.

And the second and more plot relevant political coding occurring is that of cultural isolation and racial supremacy through unification. The klingons are not baddies as a race but their unification is shown as a result of a single klingon rallying together cultural outsiders to use the threat of alien influence upon their race, to have the fear of loss of cultural identity through multiculturalism be used as a tool to unify the various seperate klingon groups into a singular empire.

it’s not a subtle metaphor but that’s what makes it star trek. It’s just interesting to me that the issue of racial prejudice disguised as a desire to preserve one’s cultural heritage is being coded as an other since the relevance to the audience might go over some heads by othering it in this way, i’ll have to wait and see what they do with these themes as the show continues.

secondly: similarity to other treks

The cinematic look for the first episodes has been done before TNG tried it and Enterprise is the most similar in it’s contemporary cinematic style for the premiere.

The opening credits have a nice song but it feels like the middle of a more compelling track, i keep waiting for it to get to a memorable melody but it never quite does until it chimes in with the original theme at the end. it’s still nice just kind of forgettable, but DS9 and voyager both had themes i found kind of boring too even if they are melodically stronger. Either way I like it better than the so bad it’s good faith of the heart that enterprise used. Speaking of the use of schematics and various objects instead of a ship flying through space reminds me a lot of Enterprise’s montage credits so even though it’ll take some getting used to i overall still like the opening credits.

The ongoing story element doesn’t bother me outside of losing the longer seasons more time for individual character explorations format every other trek series had. TNG had a couple reoccurring story elements, voyager and DS9 and ENT also got to try for longer storylines, tv changed a lot over the decade or so of continuous star trek, it hasn’t been a purely episodic show since TOS with it’s occasional reoccurring minor characters.

The closest visual and thematic series is the alternate original series films. And for once this is a compliment. It’s in the original universe but the technology and costumes are closer to the films which is annoying but i’ll forgive it because i can see ways in which they tried to imply a bridging between enterprise and TOS. The good news is they took the parental/authority figure deaths as motivation for protagonist and the cultural/racial outsider elements and the identity/rebellion elements that were applied clumsily to Kirk and Spock in the AOS films and gave them to Michael Burnham. They WORK for her because she’s a new character and it doesn’t feel like she’s being written out of character or characters that had a role of greater significance are killed off for her angst like it did with the AOS films. Her choices are more engaging because she’s new and we get to react to them and not to wether or not they should be happening at all.... that said:

thirdly: casting leads

i can’t speak from the perspective of those who need the representation but i’ll speak from the perspective of someone who grew up watching star trek with my parents every week.

My mum’s disappointment when she realised we weren’t going to have a Malaysian actress as captain and a black actress as first officer was intensified when she heard that the ongoing captain was going to be another white guy. Michelle Yeoh was fantastic and I hope we get lots of flashbacks of her interacting with Sonequa Martin-Green’s character because then it will feel less like she was killed off as a plot device.

Just having women in positions of authority talking to each-other is great to watch, it’s why Voyager is a favourite in my family, but if it’s only between white actors then there’s a problem. While having aliens stand in for race based issues is to be expected it can’t be ignored that a big part of the optimistic ideal in TOS was one of gender and racial equality on the bridge. That’s why the rather limited representations of various countries happened in TOS, not perfect but the intent is there and visually clear. The gender issue took a while but by DS9 and Voyager you had both Janeway and Sisko in command, you had B’Elanna and Seven working together to keep a shuttlecraft from breaking apart, you had Sisko calling Dax ‘old man’ and asking her advice because her previous form she was both male and his mentor, yes the alien as a racial metaphor was still in use but it was combined with diversity of casting to create representation on both actor and character levels.

So having Georgiou and Burnham with the dynamic of mentorship and mutual respect and the complexities of race versus culture being directly addressed and the conflict that comes from insubordination out of motivations of loyalty and personal prejudice... these are all great concepts and we got to see them applied to women who aren’t white, who are allowed authority and complexity and intellect and imperfections. It’s great to see and I know a lot of people are concerned with the killing off of one and incarceration of the other but while i have no defence of Yeoh’s character getting killed off for the purposes of creating drama so early in the show, I will say that with Martin-Green’s character i highly doubt she’ll be in prison long it’s almost definitely a character development thing where they’ll explore the consequences of her choices since she is the type of character where no one would have expected her to do what she did. it doesn’t look like they’re going to be totally tone deaf on the issue of her character being arrested but i can’t tell for sure yet.

The rest of the cast both seen and unseen as of episode 2 look promising, Doug Jones is a delight and I’m looking forward to Anthony Rapp’s character, I trust Jason Isaacs to give a good performance but yes I am also tired of another white guy as captain, at the very least the star trek franchise as a whole has been good about having both reoccurring and minor one off characters be reasonably diverse. there is a lot of room for improvement though and they are only just shifting more topics from metaphors to literal ones. AOS Sulu being gay was an incidental detail, Anthony Rapp’s character will hopefully have that feature inform his character but same gender attraction shouldn’t be an issue within starfleet, they can alway play with it being an issue for other aliens but either way having one couple is not enough, let’s bring issues of sexuality and gender fully out of the symbolic alien scope.

#star trek discovery spoilers #long post

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njawaidofficial · 6 years

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If You’re Not Watching “The Magicians” At This Point, You’re Missing Out On Something Great

https://styleveryday.com/2018/04/03/if-youre-not-watching-the-magicians-at-this-point-youre-missing-out-on-something-great/

If You’re Not Watching “The Magicians” At This Point, You’re Missing Out On Something Great

Hale Appleman as Eliot, embracing Summer Bishil as Margo in The Magicians.

Syfy

Here are just a few of the elements that make it stand out.

It’s one of the best ensemble shows about a group of twentysomethings.

From left: Stella Maeve as Julia, Olivia Taylor Dudley as Alice, Appleman as Eliot, Bishil as Margo, Jason Ralph as Quentin, and Arjun Gupta as Penny in a promotional shot for The Magicians.

Syfy

And it has the kind of diversity that so many of the shows it riffs on lacked.

Candis Cayne as the Fairy Queen and Bishil as Margo in The Magicians.

Syfy

Bishil as Margo in The Magicians.

Syfy

The show has a true sense of playfulness.

Appleman as Eliot and Bishil as Margo singing “One Day More” in The Magicians.

Syfy

And the fun they have with the story will also punch you in the heart (in a good way).

Sebastian Billingsley-Rodriguez as Rupert, Kylee Bush as Arielle, Ralph as Quentin, and Appleman as Eliot in the episode “A Life in the Day.”

Syfy

Eliot comforting Quentin and Rupert in “A Life in the Day.”

Syfy / Via whitefluffyyeti.tumblr.com

Gupta as an ailing Penny in The Magicians.

Syfy

Appleman and Ralph behind the scenes on the episode “A Life in the Day.”

Hale Appleman / Via instagram.com

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