I enjoyed The Magicians, but I found the two follow-ups lacking, when I expected them to keep up with the original.
Damn I had noticed a lot of series doing it, but I guess it's wider than I thought! The Magicians overdid it though. It's not a musical episode, iirc it's like 2 seasons Edit: just to be clear, I still watched those 2 entire seasons, because the story is genuinely that good, plus I was invested. But I really wish they hadn't gone musical, it really messed with the mood of the series.
oh thanks, I'll check that out! BTW, The Magicians TV series might be the best thing SyFy ever made. It's got so much heart, it's properly funny, it's creative, it's epic despite a shoestring budget, and the characters stay with you long after you finish.
Agreed I loved it! Right up until they turned it into a musical for some reason. Me and my wife call it "doing a magicians" when a TV show suddenly starts singing for no reason. But yeah up until that point it was great!
Magicians was one of the few series where it actually worked, I thought. I just recently watched the Star Trek Strange New Worlds musical ep and it was painful
"The people in this story are not like me: I find this implausible so I'm leaving it a one-star review" is to be expected. But that's already the case (if you want substantiating evidence just read my Amazon or Goodreads one-star reviews). As somebody who really enjoyed Lev Grossman's book The Magicians, I remember being somewhat perplexed by the bizarrely high number of one-star reviews on Goodreads until I realized that the predominant reason for the poor reviews was because the protagonist is self-destructive, not particularly likable, and the story isn't one of conventional…
Lev Grossman's The Magicians, and rereading Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle. I just finished Ed Sweeney's biography of Cochise a couple days ago.
Our very definition of intelligence is part of the issue. There's no question that animals exceed our knowledge in specific domains, a bird who can fly must be vastly more knowledgeable about variable wind conditions than we are. There's a great scene in Lev Grossman's The Magicians where they speak to a talking bear, but all the bear wants to talk about is caves, and area in which his knowledge is so complete that the humans cannot really even talk to him. But our definition of intelligence is narrowed to domains which we live in. That tends to be a wider than most animals, but it's hardly…