I think season 2 has been great so far personally.

I like season 2 as well. They are building on things that happened in the first season, but still moving forward. It will irritate me if they start disregarding past events and change them to fit what they are trying to do now.

I really enjoy this series glad to see alice is coming back .

@Psionova said:

I haven't read the books but I hear they're decent. This show started kinda slow, then got very interesting and hooked me in, but all that potential went down the drain when everyone went all orgy on each other.

I dropped it.

I had the exact same experience -- a bit slow in the beginning, then it picked up the pace and became really interesting, but then it went kinda downhill and I dropped it too.

-- I've seen a couple of eps. from season two, but it couldn't catch me.

I'm a long-time fan of the books, and I was excited to find out it was being made into a TV series. I've been rather disappointed with the result. I was actually enjoying the first season, but I agree with you that it started to flag toward the end, and I think the season finale was a massive shark-jump from which the show never really recovered.

The first thing I should mention is that the book series and the show are very different. The books are somewhat of a deconstruction of the fantasy genre (particularly Harry Potter and the Narnia books), with Quentin as a borderline antihero who causes more problems than he solves, a factor the show greatly downplays. In both seasons, the show pretty much goes off on its own while only vaguely using plot points from the books.

Now, I'm not one of these fanboys who insist an adaptation has to be absolutely faithful to its source material. For example, I happen to think the "Game of Thrones" show has in some ways surpassed the books it's based on. My complaint about "The Magicians" isn't that the show differs from the books, but that it's simply not as inspired. It's a lot more conventional, and sometimes downright amateurish.

There were three basic problems with the Season 1 finale: (a) it seemed to lack the budget to show Fillory in a satisfying way, including the appearance of Ember or the battle scenes that take place (b) it attempted to combine the stories of the first two books, and that resulted in dramatic overkill (c) it introduced several bizarre and tasteless ideas, from the business about Ember's magical jizz to Eliot's essentially having to renounce his homosexuality to gain the throne.

Perhaps the show's biggest problem is that I don't sense an overall vision of where it wants to take the story. There's a lack of a forward momentum, and a feeling that the writers are just winging it. And I have no idea what they're going to do in the third season (if it ever is made), since they seem to have run through just about all the story threads from the books.