Spawn Of Buffy

Following in the quippy footsteps of Joss Whedon, SyFy’s The Magicians ambitiously tweaks classic fantasy tropes

- Anna Menta

THERE’S A SCENE IN THE SYFY NETWORK’S The Magicians where the characters speak exclusively in pop culture code. “Someone is ‘XOXO, Gossip Girl’–ing our shit,” says Eliot, the flippant bad-boy ruler of a kingdom. “So we have to keep it very ‘best episode of Buffy.’”

Based on Lev Grossman’s best-selling series of the same name, The Magicians doesn’t expect you to get all those references; the scene comes with subtitled “translations,” explaining that Eliot believes someone is spying on him and his queen, Margo, so they need to try to keep things confidential (“Hush” being the referenced Buffy episode). But it does expect you to respect the effort. “This show is for people who grew up reading Harry Potter, who have seen all the Lord of the Rings movies, who have an opinion about Star Trek vs. Star Wars,” says Sera Gamble, who co-created the show with John McNamara.

The Harry Potter association is evident in Grossman’s trilogy; on the back cover of the first book, published in 2009, Game of Thrones author George R. R. Martin opines that “The Magicians is to Harry Potter as a shot of Irish whiskey is to a glass of weak tea.” The story’s Quentin Coldwater (played by Jason Ralph on the show) is a depressed 19-year-old nerd who discovers that his childhood obsession, a fantasy series called Fillory and Further, is real. He heads off to magic school, Brakebills College (Brakebills University on the show), where he collects a crew of magician friends (aged up for graduate school in the series), drinks heavily and battles inner and outer demons.