Last year, Syfy announced that it planned on adapting Lev Grossman's The Magicians series for television.
In a press conference call, the show's executive producer, Sera Gamble, and star, Jason Ralph, who portrays Quentin Coldwater on the series, discussed how the television series differs from the books, how the show portrays magic on the series and how the story differs from Harry Potter.
Inevitably, when adapting a novel to a television series, changes get made. The Magicians is no exception.
"I think the first most obvious difference that the fans will notice when they tune in is that we've aged the characters up a little bit," said Gamble. "Quentin is 17 when you meet him in the book, and he is more like 22 in our television show. They are headed into graduate school. And we did that for a number of creative and practical reasons."
Of course, that decision was not made lightly: the show's creators met with author Grossman and figured out how to make those changes work for the series. However, the show still stays true to the initial story, even with its changes.
"And I think throughout the season, we'll be hitting a lot of the greatest hits of book one," said Gamble. "We sometimes come at them a little bit differently. We say we have the same general road map but we sometimes take slightly different roads than Lev did in the books."
One thing viewers will notice is that using magic on the series involves a lot of gestures and physicality. Much of that finds it basis in a form of hip hop dancing called "finger tutting."
"We were searching for a way to kind of codify the language of magic, which is very specific and arduous and difficult and intensive, and it's done with the fingers, primarily, in Lev's books," said Gamble. "So, it was actually John McNamara's assistant. He recommended we go on YouTube and just search the term: finger tutting. And as soon as we saw that, it felt really fresh and good to us and we hired a choreographer to work with the actors."
So what was it like for the actors, having to learn how to work with this specific kind of movement?
"The experience, like learning these tutts, I found like very similar to the experience of learning the magic that I had to learn for the show, like the practical magic, the card tricks and the coin tricks and things," said Ralph. "And that is like incredibly difficult. It requires like such a mind for detail and it takes like too many hours to practice and to get right. And there is something about learning how to learn those kinds of things which was very useful in getting into the head of these kinds of people and into Quentin."
Gamble admitted that Google became a useful tool in the writer's room as they continued developing these magical concepts for the show.
"I was reading about this kind of crystal grid that someone had set up to kind of minimize the bad stuff that comes off your computer and that turned into a mind meld with our production designer (Rachel O'Toole) about what they would have to do at Brakebills in order to use conventional electronics," said Gamble. "Because essentially, Brakebills University is a place where people have been doing spell upon spell upon spell for many generations. And so, the air is very thick with enchantments and a lot of your 'so to say' muggle hardware malfunctions at Brakebills."
Inevitably, with The Magicians being a series about magic, viewers will offer up comparisons to another magic-user who went to a magic school, Harry Potter. And there is some inspiration from Harry Potter in Grossman's books: when Grossman got impatient waiting for the next book in that series, he decided to write his own. But his story came out differently.
"And in the case of Harry Potter, it's like, 'OK. Here are these kids who have magic and they have the problems of heroic children,' " said Gamble. "And then the question is, what would this be like in actual current-day New York City among older people who have the problems of everyday adult life? What does magic mean in that kind of circumstance? That was one the core ideas that The Magicians was borne out of."
For Ralph, his fondness for Harry Potter actually helped him get into his character's mindset: on the series, Quentin is obsessed with a Narnia-like fictional world, called Fillory.
"I grew up with the Harry Potter series and had a very similar experience with that," said Ralph. "But I say strangely enough, like the strongest experience I've had to a story is this made-up one, called Fillory. And I don't know what it is. But the time when I, as Quentin Coldwater, get to talk about Fillory, like my body, all the nerves in my body just spark and my brain goes crazy and I can't think and I can't make words because I'm so in love with this like make-believe world. And it's very strange and I can't explain it."
The Magicians premieres Jan. 25.
