As a huge fan of author Lev Grossman’s imaginative, insightful, and surprisingly dark trilogy The Magicians, I approached the Syfy TV series adaptation with a mix of excitement and trepidation. The key to Grossman’s books is that, at heart, they’re not really about fantasy or magic—they’re about life, depression, sex, love, heartbreak, and everything that comes with being a human being on this planet. Could the show possibly capture that brutally honest tone? How does source material with such a singular point of view adapt into an ensemble TV series? Basically I had a lot of questions, but thankfully showrunners Sera Gamble and John McNamara were able to stick to what made the books so great while also expanding and remixing the source material in a way that makes sense for television.

Season 2 of The Magicians is now underway and our characters have found themselves stepping into the shoes of royalty in the presumed-fantasy world of Fillory to wildly entertaining results. These first few episodes show much more confidence from both the writing team and the actors, as the show continues to solidify itself as something separate from the books yet worthy all the same.

I recently got the chance to speak with showrunners Sera Gamble and John McNamara for an extended, exclusive interview about all things The Magicians, as well as their unique production company Fabrication. Our wide-ranging discussion covered how they first became involved with the material, what aspects of Season 1 they wanted to improve upon for Season 2, how the writers inject a lot of their personal lives into these stories and characters, and how their original idea for the battle in the Season 1 finale evolved into something quite different. Given that they’re working from source material, we also discussed their plans for future seasons, including whether they’ll be tackling the ocean-set stories of The Magician King, and if their current plans involve a dragon (spoiler alert: they do!).

sera-gamble

If you’re a fan of The Magicians—either with or without having read the books—I think you’ll find what they have to say interesting. Running a TV series is no easy task, and running one this complex, with this many moving pieces, is a herculean challenge, so it’s fascinating to get some insight into how Gamble and McNamara pull it off. Check out the full interview below. The Magicians airs on Syfy Wednesdays at 9pm ET.

COLLIDER: I hate to start with something so broad, but I’m genuinely curious, how did this project first materialize for you two? I know it had previously been developed at a different network with a different team.

SERA GAMBLE: Yeah, in that previous iteration it was developed by our executive producer Michael London, who is a friend of Lev Grossman’s, the author of the books. John and Michael London were together producing his feature film Trumbo, which came out last year, and John had passed him along a totally different script that he and I wrote together. So that’s how I came to meet Michael London. After that meeting about something else altogether, Michael mentioned offhandedly to John, ‘Oh this book just came back to me,’ basically the rights had expired on the previous project. John mentioned it to me very offhandedly on a phone call and I completely freaked out because I was a massive, massive, massive fan of the books. And had in fact been watching the project, hoping that I could jump in there at some point and write a script or something. So John went off and read it, and then I think we were on the same page about what we loved about the material. Then we optioned it with our money. Michael, John and I went to Lev and said, ‘Look we’ll pay you for this option. We really wanna write this with no studio executives in our ear, no network executives in our ear, and do—forgive me—the most pure version of the script as we see it. And so we did that and we took it out and we shopped it, and it landed at Syfy.

I’m a huge fan of the books, so I was curious and excited to see how this would be adapted because they’re not easily adaptable books. And I’ll admit it took me an episode or two to get into the first season and accept it as something different. I had to get used to the fact that the show was a separate entity from the books. What would you say was your biggest challenge or obstacle in adapting the books back in Season 1?

john-mcnamara

JOHN MCNAMARA: I think the ongoing obstacle is how beautifully Lev writes the world of The Magicians from Quentin’s point of view. And how much readers enjoy being inside Quentin’s point of view. TV and movies and plays can’t really do that. They have to be about the external goals and obstacles and conflicts of more than one character, unless it’s a one-man-show on stage. So immediately you have to begin to sort of break down what he’s feeling and experiencing and thinking internally, and ask yourself how do you then externalize and dramatize that? And that’s an ongoing thing, because the books are very, very specifically internal in a wonderful way. And TV, by its nature, is more driven by external conflict. 

Definitely. I kind of saw that, and saw that show evolving. Again, as a big fan of the books, you totally got me with the head-fake in the Season 1 finale, where it felt like you maybe had just done your twist on the ending of that first book. Did you always plan on continuing to adapt the first book in Season 2? Was Julia running off with the Beast always your plan for how Season 1 would end?

GAMBLE: We weren’t sure exactly where within that fight we would end the season. That was something we went back and forth on throughout the season. We always knew that this is where we were headed—the structure of Season 1 is very much a classic Big Bad structure, just with all the quirks and weird nooks and crannies of this particular story. But you meet The Beast in the pilot, all season long the threat of The Beast is hanging over our characters’ heads, so it felt right that we would meet him again in the season finale. Along the way, Julia’s story changed quite a bit because as you know, we were pulling from her storyline which happens chronologically at the same time as Quentin’s in Book 1, but it happens in Book 2 of the book series. So it was actually really fun to put them side by side and see what happens, especially once we felt that we kind of had permission from ourselves and also from Lev to let things evolve a little bit differently, because that’s a necessary byproduct of shuffling the deck the way that we did.

It’s interesting because, as you said, Julia’s story happens further down the line in the books and she’s the character who arguably was the most pleasant surprise in this show for me, because I was curious to see how you guys were going to deal with that. So when you started Season 1 you weren’t exactly sure where Julia’s story was going to end up at the end of the season?

the-magicians-season-2-julia-the-beast
Image via Syfy

GAMBLE: We knew that we wanted her to be involved in the events of the finale. We knew that we wanted to loop her back in with The Beast and certainly with Quentin and all of his friends by the end of the season. But there were iterations where that fight went further, but when we got into the meat of it we realized there was so much more to tell, and as soon as we realized that we could cliffhang on Julia’s move inside the fight, then we all looked at each other and we said, ‘There’s a lot of fun stuff to explore once we put The Beast and Julia in a room together. We really wanna see what happens next, so let’s slow down and talk about this for a bit.’

And now so going into Season 2, looking back on Season 1 when you were going into the writers’ room, is there anything specifically in Season 1 that you didn’t feel like you nailed, or that informed how you approached this second season? 

MCNAMARA: I’ll be totally blunt: We wanted the visual effects to be better. That may sound like we’re letting ourselves off the hook as writers and we’re not, because we definitely learned things about tone and how to have a very funny tone inside something that’s tragic, and something very tragic suddenly have a very weird, odd, funny kind of degree to it. But honestly just the amount of work that we were doing in post in Season 1, because the visual effects just weren’t there and they had to be redone so much, versus this season—that’s the biggest thing I think we learned. We did have from Day One great production design, great locations, great costumes, fantastic actors, the writing staff was mostly intact from Season 1 to Season 2—we added two writers and subtracted one—but then we were pretty in lockstep. My only fear going into Season 2 was I thought Fillory was just gonna look bad. And because our production designer and costume designer are so good, and because we really cleaned house and started over with a new visual effects team, a lot of my fears went away as soon as I saw the drawings. And then I was able—because I had the most trepidation about Fillory, I’m not a huge fantasy fan, I’m not versed in Narnia and all that stuff, but the minute I saw it I thought oh it kind of looks like a combination of British Raj meets the Great Wall of China with a little bit of Arabian Nights thrown in, I’m like ‘That’s gonna be really cool I think.’ And then when we saw some very early visual effects by the new team, everything just relaxed. What that allows you to do is your imagination is way more free then, so I think probably the end result of that kind of bureaucratic house cleaning if you will actually had a freeing effect on our imagination. 

It definitely does look better, I will say. And I’ve seen the first five episodes of Season 2, and it’s pleasantly surprising to see how much this season focuses on Eliot and Margo. We’re seeing a very different kind of reign than what happens in the books, but it’s really compelling and dark and dramatic and funny. How did you approach the arcs for these two characters in Season 2?

the-magicians-season-2-hale-appleman-summer-bishil
Image via Syfy

MCNAMARA: I just came in with only one idea, and that is analogously the idea of children of earth ruling Fillory smacks of imperialism, and what would the locals feel about that really deep down? Which is not really explored in the books. And that then got us on a very interesting series of plot and story and character roads. I was reading some history of some country going like, ‘Man the Fillorians must really hate Earth people.’

GAMBLE: That was important in figuring out what this season was gonna be about, especially what problems they were gonna face in Fillory. I think on a more basic level about these characters, who started out as—I mean they’ve always been an immense pleasure to write, and the actors obviously are incredible and really fun to write for and elevate every word we put in their mouth. But they did start out as, at times a little bit of a Statler and Waldorf (laughs). When we were writing Season 1 we had a large array of characters. You start with Quentin and with Julia and then you go from there and you start to get to know everyone, and then once the audience really knows each character, knows some of their secrets, knows what’s going on underneath, really feels like this is a friend that they’ve lived with for a while, then we can tell more divergent stories about each character. I’m far from the only one in the writer’s room that really takes a lot out of my own life and puts it in The Magicians. I know it’s ostensibly a fantasy show but it’s really very personal when we’re writing it, and I relate strongly to both Eliot and to Margo. I thought a lot about what my life felt like in my very early 20s when there was definitely a sort of hedonistic, self-destructive streak in me, and then there was another part of me that was trying to figure out how to become a responsible adult. And because of the tools we have because we’re a fantasy show, with Eliot we get to externalize that problem of trying to figure out how to be an adult that can take care of yourself in a meaningful way. We’ve made him High King of a land he can’t leave. He can’t go and get into the kind of trouble he used to get into, he has to figure out how to solve these problems and he doesn’t have a lot of support. So he’s a more entertaining version of something that a lot of us went through. And Margo is sort of the flipside of the coin really. Though she can party with him, she is much more centered, responsible—I think of her as the natural born leader of the group, honestly. And she is running up against a lot of external boundaries, because in many ways it’s a very old-fashioned society that she’s trying to be the High Queen of, and in some ways we live in an old-fashioned society (laughs). So there was a lot of conversation about that in the writer’s room. The stories just kind of poured out, everyone was very excited to write for them.

the-magicians-season-2-jason-ralph
Image via Syfy

Well that’s interesting to hear you say because I think that’s what makes Lev’s books so great. The fantasy is fun and the mythology is very well thought-out, but they are so personal. It’s the story of a twentysomething who gets his wildest dream and he’s still unhappy, and what does that mean for him. And so now that you guys are expanding the point of view into all of these characters, it sounds like you’re infusing your own personal experiences into this ensemble.

GAMBLE: Yeah, we are. It’s certainly what spoke to me about the books, I related so strongly to them. I think starting with the moment that John and I looked at each other and said, ‘Okay let’s make this character clinically depressed in the pilot,’ we were kind of committed to telling a personal story (laughs).

Where are you at right now in the production of the season? Are you still writing?

MCNAMARA: No, no we’re just finishing post-production on the last two episodes.

So how far in advance do you guys have this series mapped out? Do you plan on digging into the ocean-set world of The Magician’s King or are we gonna see the show diverge into a different path?

MCNAMARA: I think it’ll be a little bit of both. You know the difference between an ocean in a book and an ocean in a TV series is in a TV series, oceans are expensive (laughs). But we’ve already tentatively committed to some early designs and builds of some things that will be ocean-going, to allow us to follow those parts of the book. Because I do like those things, but when I read them as a TV producer I went “Oy oy oy.” 

GAMBLE: There’s a major plotline or two in the second book that we didn’t burn out in Season 2 that we get to now use in Season 3 and beyond. Remixing these three books is fun because there’s so much material in them, and you can line up some of these great scenes and these great plot points and these great twists in a different order and come up with something visual and entertaining that sort of speaks to Lev’s original intent. That’s always at the heart of what we’re trying to do—we really are trying to bring to life the spirit of the books and the way that you felt when you read the books.

Do your plans involve a dragon?

the-magicians-season-2-cast
Image via Syfy

GAMBLE: Yes they do! (Laughs). I would characterize us as cautious producers. We’re ambitious but cautious, and from the beginning of Season 1, John and I had a lot of conversations with everybody about how we can do almost anything that we can imagine, but we can’t do it all at once. We have to take one bite at a time. And that’s really the primary reason that you don’t see much of Fillory until the end of the season. We wanted to promise Fillory but we wanted time to research and develop it, and to learn our lessons about how to do magic on the show in a world that more closely resembled our own. Similarly, the caco-demon babies that you saw in Episode 2 were in a way us running a scientific test on the possibilities for the dragon in the books. All of us really love the dragon—I don’t know, John sometimes, do you love the dragon?

MCNAMARA: I do now! 

GAMBLE: (Laughs) Now you do. All of us wanted a dragon, but we didn’t want a shitty dragon. There are some really good dragons on TV, and we don’t consider ourselves to be in direct competition with any of those shows, but there’s an expectation of quality among people who watch the kind of show we’re making, and we wanted to be able to deliver. So we started by concentrating on the baby caco-demons and seeing how they turned out, and I don’t know how you felt about them but I find them creepy and adorable.

No I really liked them a lot. They’re really cool.

GAMBLE: Yeah so from there we had the confidence to write the dragon into the story.

Well I also wanted to ask about Fabrication, which is a production company you guys created. This is a company formed by writers, which is unique. What’s your overall philosophy there and what do you guys have in the works?

the-magicians-season-2
Image via Syfy

MCNAMARA: We’ve all, the three of us in the company—Alexander Cunningham, Sara Gamble, and I—have all run shows alone, and it’s just harder than having one or two really good partners. It’s as simple as that. We can do more work, we can check each other’s work and help each other get better, and it’s a writer-centric company that attracts other writers. Essentially when a writer makes an agreement with us, at least the first phase of script development they’re mostly just working with us, so it’s kind of writer-to-writer. We were all spending so much time together anyway we decided to get paid for it (laughs). We were mostly hanging out in my garage, and then we figured out like, ‘Well somebody might pay us to sit around and bullshit’ and somebody did. 

Do you have any other projects in active development that you wanna tease?

MCNAMARA: Well I think it’s been announced The Persuaders is in active development. I think it was announced that a project we have with Rafael Iglesias called UnAmerican that’s about the Hollywood blacklist, but it’s a much darker, more ensemble take than Trumbo the movie I did was. I don’t think I can name it yet because we wanna wait for the official press release, but we acquired the rights to a really, really amazing episode of This American Life. Not Serial, but a different one that we’re adapting. Sera’s adapting a true life story of a woman who suffered traumatic brain injury and her entire life turned over in ways good and bad. There’s an amazing book by Evan Wright, who created Generation Kill. The book is called How to Get Away with Murder in America, we obviously have to change the title, but it’s a wonderful, wonderful true story of a guy who was America’s top decorated CIA agent who at the same time was Miami’s top mafia hitman. So we’re developing that and a few other things. I can think of about 10 things in the hopper. Oh Lizard King.

GAMBLE: Yes, based on the book by Byan Christy about the international exotic animal smuggling trade. It resembles what you might think of when you think of the international drug trade, but imagine a guy with a sock full of turtles, and imagine a customs agent opening a suitcase and 500 snakes fall out of it (laughs). It’s a fantastic book.

That’s certainly a diverse slate.

GAMBLE: Yeah, this is one of the really fun things about the three of us working together—Alexander, John and I—we have a very similar work ethic, we share the same goals, but our tastes are very different from one another, and we think that’s good. Each of us has little areas of expertise and we get to make more different diverse stuff as a result.