Lev Grossman's The Magicians to become Fox series

By Sean O'Neal | October 6, 2011 | 5:09pm

Aux Features TV

The networks’ ongoing quest to find just the right “Harry Potter for adults”-style story has yielded the Fox drama Magicians, based on Lev Grossman’s popular The Magicians fantasy novels—which actually has been called “a Harry Potter for adults.” It was just sitting there the whole time! Anyway, The Magicians imagines a world of wonder, then fills it with touchy, angst-ridden twentysomethings. It doesn’t get much more “adult” than that—except when you add in self-hating homosexuals and lots and lots of alcohol, even for the talking bears—and the book’s nods to Harry Potter are obvious, seeing as it taking place in a school for wizards. Even better for our modern TV fairy-tale adaptations, that school is right in the middle of New York, which is where all the secret magical worlds are these days.

Thor and X-Men: First Class co-writers Ashley Miller and Zack Stentz will handle the writing duties, having proven themselves capable with stories of people whose petty grudges and self-absorption tends to get in the way of their supernatural powers. And should The Magicians, Michael Green’s “magical New York” procedural, and that Beauty And The Beast reboot all go to air next year—all of them following this year’s Grimm and Once Upon A Time, of course—perhaps the networks can at last end their quest for a show with “Harry Potter for adults” sensibilities, and maybe dream up some nice, down-to-earth shows about lawyers or something.