Apple TV’s British import Small Prophets is already one of the best-reviewed series of the year on both sides of the pond, and one of the best examples of the powerful ways that magical realism can be used to tell compelling stories onscreen. The six-episode first season is a deeply human story of grief, loss, and searching for answers that follows a store clerk still looking for a girlfriend who’s been missing for seven years. While this might sound like the plot of any one of a dozen or so popular procedurals, Small Prophets is very determinedly not that show.
Instead, the series sees hardware clerk Michael (Pearce Quigley) turn to medieval alchemy for answers, attempting to grow the small, truth-telling spirits known as homunculi in his garden shed. A weird and wonderful tale that introduces something that feels an awful lot like magic to its otherwise fairly straightforward world, it uses the supernatural to tell a larger, human story about the dangers of a life half lived. But it’s hardly alone when it comes to using elements of the mystical or uncanny to explore familiar stories in new ways.
Apple TV is streaming new episodes of Small Prophets through November 4, but if you’re looking for more series that use elements of magical realism, we’ve put together a guide for you.
One Hundred Years Of Solitude
Cast: Diego Vásquez, Marco Antonio González Ospina, Marleyda Soto, Susana Morales Cañas, Édgar Vittorino, Claudio Cataño, Loren Sofía, Akima, Nicole Montenegro Sánchez, Janer Villarreal, Carla Baratta, Estefanía Piñeres, Emmanuel Restrepo, and Sebastián Osorio.
Number of seasons: Two
Gabriel García Márquez’s novel One Hundred Years Of Solitude is one of the foundational texts of magical realism as a literary genre, a unique blend of romance, history, war, family, superstition, and faith, told across seven generations of the Buendía clan in the fictional village of Macondo. Long considered one of the great unfilmable stories, it’s probably not surprising that Netflix’s 16-part Spanish-language adaptation isn’t always particularly faithful to its source material. (The novel contains surprisingly little dialogue, for example.) But it gets its wild, untamable spirit exactly right. Full of weird, striking, and, yes, magical imagery, it brings the idealistic rise and fall of a family, a city, and perhaps even humanity itself to vivid, haunting life. Is it a bit more challenging than the average TV show? Probably, thanks to its dense plot and sprawling cast of characters who all seem to share one of about four names. But its wild and occasionally incomprehensible journey is still one well worth taking.
Carnivale
Cast: Nick Stahl, Clancy Brown, Clea Duvall, Adrienne Barbeau, Tim DeKay, Michael J. Anderson, Amy Madigan, and Patrick Bauchau
Number of seasons: Two, but the second ends on a cliffhanger
A sprawling, wildly ambitious tale of good, evil, wonder, madness, and virtually everything in between, HBO’s Carnivale was like very little else on the network—or anywhere else—when it premiered in 2003. Set during the 1930s in the middle of the Dust Bowl, the series follows a traveling circus led by an unseen, godlike figure known only as Management, and mixes the gritty realities of day-to-day living with the sweeping scope of the supernatural and uncanny. Packed with occult symbolism, religious iconography, shared dreamscapes, prophecies, and miracles, it’s a show that’s beautiful to look at and which defies easy description as it wrestles with cosmic questions of destiny and fate through all too flawed and human avatars. Sadly canceled after just two seasons, the show ends on a massive cliffhanger. Yet, it’s still absolutely worth the watch.
Wonderfalls
Cast: Caroline Dhavernas, Lee Pace, Katie Finneran, Tyron Leitso, William Sadler, Diana Scarwid, and Tracie Thoms
Number of seasons: One
Many series have unceremoniously ended before they could find their audience, but the sudden and abrupt conclusion of Bryan Fuller’s Wonderfalls was particularly egregious. Canceled after just four episodes aired, the aggressively whimsical comedy-drama is one of the best shows that far too many people have never even heard of, let alone seen. Wonderfalls follows the story of Jayne, a cynical, twenty-something slacker working at a gift shop in Niagara Falls whose life is turned upside down when various inanimate objects start talking to her. (Well, provided they have a mouth, of course.) From a wax lion and a brass monkey to a cow-shaped creamer and a fish mounted on a restaurant wall, they all start telling her to do things and won’t leave her alone until she follows their instructions. But, perhaps surprisingly, this isn’t a story of madness, and all their instructions are meant to help those in need. It is through their well-meaning bullying that Jayne slowly begins to reintegrate herself into her larger community.
The House Of The Spirits
Cast: Alfonso Herrera, Dolores Fonzi, Nicole Wallace, Rochi Hernández, Sara Becker, Fernanda Castillo, Juan Pablo Raba, Aline Küppenheim, Eduard Fernández, Maribel Verdú, Antonia Zegers, Nicolás Contreras, and Néstor Cantillana
Number of seasons: One
Prime Video’s take on The House Of The Spirits—another foundational text of magical realism that’s often mentioned alongside Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years Of Solitude as the best the genre has to offer—isn’t the first adaptation of Isabel Allende’s classic. But it’s the far superior one. The 1993 film’s star-studded group of weirdly miscast Anglo actors and truncated runtime didn’t do the novel’s complex, nuanced story any favors. But Prime Video’s eight-part Spanish version finally gives it the prestige treatment it deserves.
Featuring lush visuals of sweeping landscapes and colorfully designed interiors, The House Of The Spirits follows multiple generations of the Trueba family in an unnamed Latin American country that bears multiple unsubtle parallels to early 20th-century Chile and incorporates allegorized elements from Allende’s own life. A cross-generational saga that features clairvoyance, telekinesis, ghosts, and precognition alongside everyday themes of justice, fate, and betrayal, it deftly blends the mystical with the mundane (and occasionally terrifying) world of human politics and ambition. Though it makes some fairly major changes to its source material (one member of the Trueba clan is excised from this adaptation entirely!), it’s still thematically on point.
The Underground Railroad
Cast: Thuso Mbedu, Chase W. Dillon, Joel Edgerton, Fred Hechinger, Peter Mullan, Mychal-Bella Bowman, Sheila Atim, Aaron Pierre, William Jackson Harper
Number of seasons: One
Barry Jenkins’ limited series adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 2016 novel is unlike any Civil War series you’ve ever seen before. Reimagining the 19th-century covert network of secret routes and safehouses that helped enslaved Black people escape north as a literal railroad powered by subterranean steam engines, the result is something that’s both unbelievably magical and uncomfortably hyperrealistic. The series follows an orphaned slave named Cora (Mbedu) who flees an antebellum Georgia plantation only to find a series of increasingly dark horrors on the road to her eventual freedom. Her journey through a variety of distinctly awful slave states—South Carolina, for example, secretly practices eugenics, while North Carolina essentially attempts to exterminate every Black person in its borders—is harrowing stuff, but the story is ultimately a bittersweet study in resilience that refuses to let us look away from the trauma of our past. (Maybe don’t binge this one though.)
Pushing Daisies
Cast: Lee Pace, Anna Friel, Chi McBride, Kristin Chenoweth, Ellen Green, Swoosie Kurtz, and Jim Dale
Number of seasons: Two
Bryan Fuller’s work tends to be flavored with various degrees of magical realism (see also: Wonderfalls, above), but his whimsical, fairy-tale-tinged series Pushing Daisies is probably the best example of this trend in his work. It follows the story of a pie maker (Pace) with the ability to bring dead things back to life with a single touch, who uses his powers to help solve crimes by simply asking murder victims who killed them. (This ability comes with some stringent rules, most notably that a second touch kills the resurrected again, but leaving a reanimated person alive for longer than a minute causes someone nearby to die. A life for a life, after all.)
The show’s quirky small-town aesthetic, vibrant color palette, and fairytale-style narrator are a few of the series’ unique elements that are seamlessly woven into the fabric of its larger universe, and its seemingly macabre framing hides a surprisingly warm and rich celebration of life.
Dollface
Cast: Kat Dennings, Brenda Song, Shay Mitchell, and Esther Povitsky
Number of seasons: Two
A more lighthearted pick than some of the other entries on this list, Dollface stars Kat Dennings as Jules, a thirtysomething trying to get over a bad breakup only to realize how much of her life was built around her ex-boyfriend. As she relearns how to reconnect with the world—more specifically, with the female friends she’s ignored for the sake of a man—her anxiety and loneliness manifest themselves physically, in the form of dream sequences, imaginary game shows, and other visual gags, many of which often include a recurring guide with the face of a cat that essentially serves as Jules’s subconscious. (Over the course of the show’s two seasons, this avatar appears as everything from a bus driver to a therapist.) It’s a remarkably clever way to explore the complicated layers of Jules’ psyche, and the series has some smart things to say about modern dating, socializing, and female friendship.
Schmigadoon!
Cast: Cecily Strong, Keegan-Michael Key, Dove Cameron, Ariana DeBose, Jaime Camil, Kristin Chenoweth, Alan Cumming, Jane Krakowski, Aaron Tveit, Tituss Burgess, Fred Armisen, Ann Harada, Patrick Page, and Martin Short
In the strictest sense, Apple TV’s Schmigadoon! is more meta fantasy than magical realism, if we want to be technical about it. But if you enjoy stories that freely mix the mundane and the fantastic to a delightfully compelling end, there’s hardly a more entertaining example than this quirky relationship drama that sees a couple work out their problems through copious application of spontaneous song. A love letter to musical theater, its storied history, and the various Broadway alums who pop up throughout its two seasons, Schmigadoon! creates a bright, colorful world built on the familiar framework established by Brigadoon and Chicago, which it then uses to interrogate familiar, modern-day problems. Self-aware enough to acknowledge its own artifice and yet fully committed to taking its premise seriously, it’s a series that probably shouldn’t work at all, but does.
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