Netflix Dark Fantasy Series Is Perfect For Supernatural Fans

The Magicians originally aired on the Syfy network in December of 2015, when most of us were still watching terrestrial TV, and a few of us knew to monitor Syfy for great content. As a longtime fan of Supernatural, it is no surprise that I instantly fell in love with The Magicians, as the series creator, Sera Gamble, got her start with Sam and Dean. Seriously, when she took over for Eric Kripke, I swear Supernatural got even better. 

Well, she brought all of her creativity and imagination to bear with The Magicians, a show based on the novels written by Lev Grossman, formerly a writer for The New York Times. He is a self-professed literature and fantasy lover, and he has said he brought many of the books that influenced him into his writing of The Magicians, including C.S. Lewis and JK Rowling. Once you watch the show or read the books, you can see these influences shining brightly through. 

The Magicians opens up with high school seniors Quentin Coldwater (Jason Ralph) and Julia Wicker (Stella Maeve) preparing for interviews to attend Princeton and other elite schools in and around New York, where they live. Quentin, a longtime fan of a fantasy novel series, Fillory and Further, similar to the Narnia novels, is still a firm believer in magic. Julia and his other friends gently tease him for it. 

Still, Quentin and Julia find themselves brought into testing rooms for a magic school when they think they are headed to interviews. Quentin, surprisingly, passes, and Julia, also surprisingly, fails.

These are surprises because Quentin, from the very beginning, shows very little aptitude for magic, while Julia seems to be a savant of sorts. In any event, Quentin heads to a school for magic, Brakebills, and Julia heads back to the real world, with her memory apparently erased of her test and any knowledge of magic. 

From here, parallel stories unfold in The Magicians. Quentin attends an elite school where he meets classmates Penny and Alice and Seniors Eliot and Margo, who are supposed to be “mentoring” the younger students. Quentin is kind of the quiet nerd, Penny is the sexy playboy, Alice is the genius, Eliot is the alcoholic, and Margo is the lustrous, worldly woman.

Eliot and Margo are an inseparable pair in an entirely unromantic way (as Eliot is gay), and these two may be my favorite characters in the show. Their banter is everything. 

Meanwhile, Julia becomes obsessed with teaching herself magic. For some reason, the memory erasure doesn’t work on her, and she masters magic and joins a group of outcasts called hedge-witches. Their magic takes on dark and unwieldy aspects, and at one point, Julia and her cohort summon a god of sorts, who ends up impregnating Julia. Julia’s storyline is perhaps the most interesting and complex among the characters in The Magicians. 

Across five seasons, The Magicians takes us on a wild ride, in and out of our own realm and world, in and out of Brakebills, and even across timelines. There is nothing childish about this show, and yet it is also not cheesy and graphic, as some supernatural fantasy shows can be. It is, in a word, perfect. The characters, their storylines, and the entire narrative arc are handled with maturity and reserve for topics that can feel out of control and ridiculous. 

I highly recommend you stream The Magicians on Netflix next time you’re ready to lose yourself in an epic fantasy. When you’re done, you can watch, or rewatch, Ralph’s wife, Rachel Brosnahan, in The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel!