This is just like magic!
A few weeks ago, the Syfy network announced their plans to adapt Lev Grossman's
fantasy trilogy, The Magicians
, into an hourlong drama series. The small handful of blogs and online news outlets who covered the story labelled the project "Harry Potter
for adults," or else slapped it with a somewhat derisive-sounding "Young Adult fantasy" label. On the surface, it's easy to see how people can mistake The Magicians
for any number of other "young people discovering they're mystically special" narrative, but it's a description that is, nevertheless, inaccurate.
Now I'm not crazy. I know a story about a group of young adults who attend a magic school and then go traipsing around an alternate universe which can be accessed via an interstitial forest sounds a lot like "Harry Potter
for adults." But what that description betrays is a failure to understand that Grossman's series isn't a rip-off of either story, but is instead something newer and stranger than that.