The parts of Fillory that the show is inventing have a faint whiff of fan fiction to them, but maybe that's inevitable?

| I did like that they hit the reset button hard on Julia's story. I mean, I have no idea what they're planning, but they now have the opportunity to do all the stuff they skipped, which would be nice.

Even some quick, Rocky-training-montage type stuff would go a long way towards grounding their magic in something tangible. As it's portrayed in the show, it's more like an inherent talent than a learned skill, which is less interesting.

How the show's writers decided that learning how to do magic was the part of the books too boring for TV is a mystery to me.

The Magicians: You have to factor in the relative delta of the position of Earth in the solar system.

Yes, from what I've seen, Grossman fully endorsed everything in the show. He said he saw early cuts and approved everything; the actors said he was always available for questions about their characters, etc. All the stuff you'd expect everyone to say, like Kit Harrington denying he'll ever be Jon Snow again. Right.

This reminds me of GRRM saying that he intentionally wrote GoT to be unfilmable; after years of writing for TV, he wanted to do the opposite. When I read Magicians, I thought about that more that a few times; like, these are the choices an author makes when he knows his ideas are too crazy/great to ever make it to…

I'm hazy on the book chronology — it's been a few years. But if I have them right, we'll get some hints about Fillory in how they handle the animal transformations and the hijinks at the south pole. If those are good, or done competently in an unexpected way, I'll be less fearful that they'll mangle (or delete) the…

| Maybe they'll have real rams that just have voice-over, or something?

If you had to guess, do you think they'll just omit most of that stuff? Or, at least, not show it but have someone tell it?

Yeah. I'm also a little worried about how the pull of the effects. A talking Ram god and a Cozy Horse and a chain smoking tree, et al, are super cool in a book. On screen they could be a disaster.

Does that mean we're going to get like a three episode arc of newly invented stuff, in the middle there?

| …he cowered in the battle with the Beast while his classmates did all the work

It's not just the quantity of commercials, but what's this thing of hiding the transition from show to ad so that they blur together? There's not even a fade to black. Is this new? (I've been away from network tv too long, I guess.)

Yes, I think it's exactly like that.

Yeah, I get that. It's just that the convenience of that stand-in makes the other pop culture references clang for me a bit. It was the same with the books, but somehow less troublesome in reading than in watching. I dunno.

At the one where I work, they're concealing the embarrassing architectural compromises of the 70's with glass atriums (atria?) and corridors to nowhere. It's pretty funny; if you've got tens of millions of dollars to burn.

I've watched three lectures by Grossman since the show started, and in each he makes a big point about how one of his goals for the series was to omit the "big bad"; the obvious evil enemy. So what does the show do? Ugh.

Ha! Since I didn't read GoT, it's pleasantly strange to be on the other side with this one. Just wish there was a Newbie's thread, so I could indulge my inner Idiotking.

I agree about Julia's story. I acclimated to the idea of it running in parallel with Quentin's, and I think they're handling that well enough, but what's the freaking rush? Just like the missing nuts and bolts at Brakebills, the part where she really had to find proof that magic even exists on her own, and then grind…