(Photo: Syfy / Hilary Bronwyn Gayle / SyFy )

There’s a kind of sly genius behind the SyFy Channel’s new series “The Magicians,” which begins with a number of thinly disguised references to frothy, magic-laced fantasies such as “Harry Potter,” “The Secret Garden” and “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe,” among others.

But “The Magicians,” premiering Monday, Jan. 25, is anything but adapted kiddie lit.

• The series, adapted by Sera Gamble and John McNamara from Lev Grossman’s best-selling trilogy, focuses on misfit and recent college graduate Quentin Coldwater (Jason Ralph), who is about to take an entrance exam for postgraduate work at Yale.

As a kid, he was deeply into fantasy and magic, as were many of his friends, including his bestie, Julia (Stella Maeve). Other kids grew out of the fantasy phase, but not Quentin. He knows what he’s supposed to be doing at this point in his life, but his heart isn’t in it. His Peter Pan syndrome has landed him in a mental institution for a few days and earned him a mood-leveling drug prescription.

Quentin is fixated on a five-novel series of fantasy books by the fictional Christopher Plover called “Fillory & Further,” about three English children who enter a secret world by stepping into a grandfather clock. One day, Quentin is handed the manuscript of a hitherto unknown sixth book in the series, which leads him into the land of Fillory and to an upstate New York magic college known as Brakebills University.  Read more…

http://www.sfchronicle.com/tv/article/SyFy-manages-a-neat-trick-with-The-Magicians-6772018.php