The following contains spoilers for the first-season finale of The Magicians.
So Syfy's bawdy and foul-mouthed The Magicians, which wrapped up its first season earlier this week, is Harry Potter for grown-ups, right? Well, I wouldn't really know. I never read any of J.K. Rowling's novels, and I've watched only Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, better known in America as Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. I found the 2001 Chris Columbus movie to be a ponderous slog back in 2002, so I never sat through another Harry Potter flick again. Not even Daniel Radcliffe can sit through most of his own Potter movies: he actually dislikes most of his performances as the titular boy wizard ("My acting is very one-note and I can see I got complacent and what I was trying to do just didn't come across," he once admitted) and considers his performance in the fifth movie to be his least flawed.
Potter is a franchise that just won't die, even after I resisted watching the seven other Potter movies for so long because of both the tedium of much of the 152-minute (!) first movie and the fact that the Potter franchise is white as fuck. Universal opened the Wizarding World of Harry Potter attraction at its Universal Studios Hollywood theme park last weekend. In July, the Wizarding World attraction will be followed by the West End premiere of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, a two-part stage play that takes place 19 years after the events of Rowling's final Potter novel, and then in November, Warner Bros. will attempt to build a series of Potter prequel movies out of the 2001 Rowling book Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, a fake school textbook about the creatures Harry and his Hogwarts classmates encountered in the Potter novels.
So because of the onslaught of all this Potter shit (and because that new Fantastic Beasts teaser trailer actually looks enticing), I've lately been considering doing a rewatch of Sorcerer's Stone and a marathon in which I would be viewing the Potter sequels for the first time, as homework for the AFOS blog's "I Can't Believe I've Never Seen It Till Now!" series. For now though, if I want my magic school genre fix, I prefer Syfy's adaptation of Lev Grossman's Magicians trilogy, a series of novels I was unfamiliar with before the January debut of the Syfy version, which has been renewed for a second season.
"Potter for grown-ups"--the most frequently repeated shorthand description of The Magicians by the press--isn't a completely accurate breakdown of the show, although there are a few campus scenes of beloved character actors (whattup, "Cutthroat Bitch"!) teaching difficult sorcery techniques to the younger cast members, just like the only scenes in Sorcerer's Stone that didn't make me snooze. In its first season, The Magicians has been more like a millennial In the Mouth of Madness, which, for me, is a more enticing hook than "Potter for grown-ups."
