The other day I tried my hand at a little review after I watched the movie Silence.
I just finished season 2 of The Magicians on Netflix and I would like to put a few thoughts down.
I had to watch the first episode twice to get into the show. The first time I tried watching the show months ago, my interest was not captured by the pilot episode. It felt sluggish to me. Many pilots are that way though. I distinctly remember hating the pilot episode to True Blood. I would later end up enjoying the show.
My main critique of the show is some of of fast paced reference based humor in The Magicians is extremely clunky and can be delivered at very jarring moments. One of the shows that nailed fast dialogue packed with references is Gilmore Girls. The Magicians in many ways falls short. The often cynical humor feels like an obvious knock-off.
As a viewer, I don't mind zany plot lines or cheesy genre fiction elements. What I did mind about The Magicians though was the show's sort of...evident awareness of it's own zany plot lines and cheesy elements. There was a palpable cynicism in the writing in the vein of Deadpool that kind of ruins the fun of this genre. The whole wink and eyeroll robs the viewers, at times, from getting swept away in the escapism of fantasy.
Quentin Coldwater, a character from the show is a huge fan and nerd for a fantasy book series about a magical land called Fillory. His peers are constantly teasing him about his boyish and naive love of Fillory. In the writing of the show, viewers are essentially put into the shoes of Quentin. Viewers who want to give themselves over to the fun of fantasy are constantly pulled back and reminded by cynical jokes that none of this is real and it's all a little bit stupid.
Now while those are my main critiques of the show, I did find it largely enjoyable in a watch-while-doing-something-else type way. I mostly watched the series while doing cardio at the gym.