#If u can't tell i am listening to the Magnus Archives

[the-four-eyed-stray]

I loved the part in the Magnus Archives where Jane Prentiss said "it's wormin' time," and wormed all over the place

[feathered-serpents]

hi ! i have harboured a weird little daydream of adapting tma into a true-to-source-material show in the Far Future when im already an Established Creator but anyway the archive 81 shit was disheartening as hell but your posts dissecting what a tv adaptation would look like are always so neat and cool. thank u

No prob!

I do see people's apprehension towards a TMA adaptation as reasonable, TMA is at the end of the day very hard to adapt into a non-audio medium, but I think assuming the worst isn't the best mindset to have, and honestly just... not fun. A T.V show would be very different, but imagining how it could be different and still feel like TMA is actually very fun to me so I like to do it.  I wish you luck in your endeavors! 

(I feel like it's important to clarify that there has been no news about a TMA adaptation, all we know is that RQ has some stuff “bubbling up” for Magnus they can't tell us about, that's literally it. Could be an adaptation, could be a TMA monopoly game, it's anyone's guess.)

This is the part where I use your ask as an excuse to muse about something I saw brought up on my adaptation posts a lot: "I don't want a TV adaptation of TMA, but I'd be okay with a spinoff"

Here is the problem with that

Spinoffs are almost never adapted into a medium like television because a spinoff basically requires knowledge of the source material, if you spinoff TMA for a T.V show, you're going to lose a lot of lore that you need in order to understand what's going on. This makes it inaccessible for new fans, and new fans are going to be what whatever platform it is hosted on wants. Yes, they will know that the TMA audience is there and will want to appeal to them, but they need to try and appeal to a wider audience as well. The audience you need for a T.V show to be successful is MUCH bigger than what you need for a podcast to be successful.

If you want your T.V show spinoff to take place post-eyepocalypse as I saw suggested more than once, you're going to have a huge group of people who have no idea what the eyepocalypse is, what caused it, what ended it, and what it means for the world we're seeing now. The amount of exposition you're going to need would warrant an entire show. Five seasons of a show in fact.

Lastly, the audience that TMA had might not even come back for a spinoff, networks already know that amount of fans who will watch the show is lower than the fans who listened to the podcast since some will no longer be interested and some might be against an adaptation and refuse to watch. A spinoff? That number drops again, fans who liked the podcast may not want a spinoff, so you lose a good portion of your captive audience and don't provide an entry point for a new audience, who is this show for now? If you adapt TMA itself, more people come back out of curiosity to reinvest in a story they already know, and since you're starting from the beginning the entry point for new viewers is wide open.

I'm not saying it's impossible I am saying that it's extremely unlikely. How many visual adaptations of something have been billed as a "spinoff" to a book or podcast? Put What We Do in the Shadows down that is based on a MOVIE that was already pretty popular and a much more accessible medium than a book or podcast. I'm sure someone out there CAN name one, but they're incredibly rare, and there's a reason for that.

If we get a Magnus Archives T.V show, it will not be a spinoff, it's going to be billed as the Magnus Archives from the start as that's just the most logical way to do it.

Finally, I did actually sit down and watch the Archive 81 show and it was... as a standalone horror drama it honestly would've been good maybe even great but as an adaptation of Archive 81 it was bad. I only listened to the first season of 81 as the second season is RADICALLY different and did not grab me, but I enjoyed the first season. Admittedly I don't remember much, but from what I DO remember, the show follows it roughly until about episodes 3-4 when it jumps off the rails entirely. This is my greatest fear for a TMA adaptation, not just the queer erasure but getting a show that is called "The Magnus Archives" that has characters with the same names but just... isn't Magnus. Maybe it's not even bad it just isn't Magnus, that I think would break my heart

The A81 show keeps the rat though, they straightwashed a whole lesbian but they remembered the rat