I liked the adaptation. I really enjoyed the books (though I haven’t yet read “Magician’s Land” yet). The show got clunky at times, but generally stuck to the spirit of the books (well, aside from Quentin being far more sympathetic / much less of a self-centered dick). The change in the ending was quite shocking though. I wonder how much they’ll actually diverge from the source material and if they’ll ever get to the 2nd half of Book 2 (my favorite part of the book series so far) - maybe after they do the digression of Julia taking Martin away to get revenge on Reynard?
It’s sort of similar, but very different than the book 1’s ending.
For one (slight book spoiler):
Julia isn’t there in Fillory in the book version
For second (major book spoiler):
Alice sacrifices herself, and becomes a niffin, to kill Martin.
My wife (doper Araminty, a huge fan of the books) and I (a fan of the books) watched the series, and found it inconsistent.
Things we liked:
-The actors and acting
-The production values, for the most part. The Beast, for instance, was fabulously creepy
Things we didn’t like:
-The pacing. So many times things just showed up, were important briefly, and then vanished. For instance, Julia’s super-bestie-friend-prayer-buddies, who had such a lengthy and interesting introduction in the book, just appeared more or less out of thin air.
-Having illogical stuff happen to fit the arc the characters were supposed to be having, which feels like a sign of lazy writing. A particularly glaring example of this is in the pilot episode, when Quentin finds a copy of book 6 of Fillory, and Julia makes fun of him for still caring about nerdy things when they were young. What the F? It’s one thing to say “hey, get over that, those were children’s books”. It’s another to just not care or notice that a unique and incredibly valuable manuscript has mysteriously appeared out of thin air. And same for Penny reading and then destroying it, and meh, no one really seems to notice or care. Even non-nerds are going to take notice if a previously unknown Narnia book is discovered. I really hate shows where I’m constantly yelling at the screen and pointing out the incredibly stupid and obvious mistakes the characters are making, particularly when they are supposed to be super-geniuses.
Overall, we enjoyed it and are looking forward to season 2. But it DEFINITELY had its flaws.