• PDI Press

    PDI Press

    BETTY WHITE VS THE STUPID WORLD: The Movie

    PDI Press
    January 17, 2022 2

    Betty White Vs the Stupid World (Chapter Seven)

    PDI Press
    January 16, 2022 1

    Betty White Vs the Stupid World (Chapter Six)

    PDI Press
    January 15, 2022 3

    Featured

    BETTY WHITE VS THE STUPID WORLD: The Movie

    John E. Meredith
    PDI Press
    January 17, 2022 2
    • PDI Press Catalog
    • PDI Press Writers
      • Fiction
  • Columns A-D
    • A Fistful of Dollar Comics
    • ABCs of Horror
    • All Binge… No Purge
    • Anything Joes
    • Beautiful Creatures
    • Big Eyes Smart Mouth
    • Big Sleeps and Long Goodbyes
    • Cahiers du Horror
    • Dispatches From the Field
    • Drive-In Saturday
    • Dungeons & D-Listers
  • Columns F-P
    • The Final Girl
    • First Looks… Second Thoughts
    • The Flesh is Weak
    • Innocence and Experience
    • Lost in Translation
    • Marvel at the Movies
    • Muppets 101
    • Page to Screen
    • Popcorn Cinema
    • The Psycho Drive-In Podcast
    • Psycho Essentials: The ’80s!
  • Columns S-Z
    • Schlock & Awe
    • Shakespeare on Film
    • Shot for Shot
    • Sick Flix
    • Unnatural Selections
    • Versus
    • Video Word Made Flesh
    • We Got Lists
    • Women in Horror
    • The Xeno File
    • Zombies 101
  • Reviews

    Reviews

    Superman (2025)

    Movies
    July 10, 2025 57

    Final Destination: Bloodlines (2025)

    Movies
    June 26, 2025 8

    Predator: Killer of Killers (2025)

    Movies
    June 8, 2025 13

    Featured

    Superman (2025)

    Nate Zoebl
    Movies
    July 10, 2025 57
    • Books
    • Comics
    • DVD/Blu-ray
    • Movies
    • TV
    • Series
  • Interviews

    Interviews

    Interview with Indie Horror Master, Chris Bickel

    Interviews
    July 13, 2018 397

    David Black: Carnies, Carnage, and the Creative Chaos of Darkness Visible

    Interviews
    March 7, 2017 223

    Jaiden Kaine joins the Marvel Universe as new Luke Cage baddie, Zip

    Interviews
    September 29, 2016 8

    SDCC 2016 Interviews: The Cast and Creators of Batman: The Killing Joke

    Interviews
    July 28, 2016 61

    SDCC 2016 Interviews: The Cast and Creators of Syfy’s Van Helsing

    Interviews
    July 27, 2016 3

    Wondercon Interview: The Cast of Damien

    Interviews
    April 16, 2016 3

    Featured

    Interview with Indie Horror Master, Chris Bickel

    The Final Girl
    Interviews
    July 13, 2018 397
  • News

    News

    Regular Show: The Complete Series DVD is here!

    News
    February 9, 2025 20

    “PATER NOSTER AND THE MISSION OF LIGHT” UNLEASHES TERRIFYING UNDERGROUND HORROR – A PSYCHEDELIC CULT MOVIE EXPERIENCE COMING SOON!

    News
    November 15, 2023 74

    Breaking Down The Upcoming DC Studios Slate

    Shot for Shot
    February 1, 2023

    Featured

    Regular Show: The Complete Series DVD is here!

    Paul Brian McCoy
    News
    February 9, 2025 20
    • Trailers
  • Psychos
  • Shop
Breaking
  • Superman (2025)
  • Final Destination: Bloodlines (2025)
  • Predator: Killer of Killers (2025)
  • From the World of John Wick: Ballerina (2025)
  • RSS
  • Facebook
  • Instagram
  • Twitter
  • Tumblr
  • Who We Be
  • Contact
    Home
    Reviews

    The Magicians 1.01 “Unauthorized Magic”

    Allison Mattern
    ReviewsTV
    January 24, 2016

    [Editor’s Note: The Magicians aired its pilot last month and will show it again on Monday, January 25 as the first half of the two-hour official premiere. Here’s our take on the pilot…]

    The Magicians comes out of the gate with an uneven start, but ends with just enough intrigue to keep me coming back. I always reserve my super harsh criticisms of a show for after the pilot episode because pilots seem to always be pretty uneven. There are a lot of characters to introduce, the premise of the story has to be explained, and in a science fiction pilot, you have to introduce your audience to the particular world that the characters are going to inhabit. That being said, I’m going to give The Magicians another shot to impress me. It really seemed to hit its stride at the very end of the pilot so I’m hoping that momentum will continue and build in Episode 2.

    NUP_166556_0855.jpg

    The Magicians is an adaptation of Lev Grossman’s Magicians trilogy that often gets described as “Harry Potter for adults.” Well, the book series begins that way, but then quickly takes some sharp left turns that lead us far away from Hogwarts and into a sexier, crazier, and more violent direction entirely. We begin with our protagonist Quintin signing himself out of a mental hospital for depression. He leads an empty life where everything seems meaningless and purposeless. Serving as a way of escape from reality, he has a preoccupation with the childhood book series about the Chatwin brothers and sisters who travel to the land of Fillory, a direct parallel to the land of Narnia created by C.S. Lewis.

    Very early on, Quintin and his friend Julia are both recruited by a magical school called Brakebills, a sort of Ivy League school for Magicians. While Julia fails the entrance exam, leading to a downward spiral of depression and magical obsession, Quintin passes, and begins his education. But since it can’t really be that simple in TV land, we soon learn that Darker Forces are at work, including The Beast, a mysterious entity with unknown origins or motivations.

    magicians-101-02

    My first gripe with the series is the casting. As an avid reader of The Magicians series by Lev Grossman, I already had pretty strong images of what the characters should look and act like, and there is one definite miss in that regard that just irks me. In wanting to amp up the sex appeal it looks like they went with a cast from a CW teen series, and Quintin’s classmate Alice is the worst transgression in that regard. Obviously a beautiful girl, they try to make her seem shy and mousy by- surprise!- adding glasses and having her nervously hunch over when she walks.

    The exception to the bad casting is Quintin (Jason Ralph). While he is portrayed as a much more likable character in the show than he was in the books, this is perhaps understandable: you don’t want your audience to hate the main character. He gives a great performance, balancing between self-consciousness and just the right amount of arrogance—such as when Julia, who decides to learn magic on her own, shows off a neat little self-taught spark of magic and Quintin suggests that maybe, just maybe, she’s not cut out for this whole magic thing. He comes off like an asshole, but not too much of one to turn us off.

    magicians-101-03

    Another major gripe is that the story just moved too fast in the first episode. It didn’t allow for an investment in the characters and their stories or for any world development which was really disappointing to me. The best part about science fiction is when you feel absorbed and a part of this entirely foreign world, and I just did not get that in this episode. Once Quintin begins his studies as Brakebills, Elliot, another classmate, gives a lazy explanation of some of the different types of magic being learned as he and Quintin walk through the campus courtyard, and then bam! The next scene takes us halfway through the school year.  At the end of the pilot, in fact, the entire first half of book 1 in the trilogy has been covered.

    The episode does end on a high note, though, with a truly terrifying and quite violent introduction to The Beast, who takes a quite unexpected victim. But while I did enjoy the end of the episode, and found it to be a great cliffhanger, I think that more could have been accomplished by really spending time developing the idea of Brakebills and letting us get to know the characters of Quintin, Alice, Elliot, and the others.

    magicians-101-04

    My one last minor gripe is that while in the book series, the sex seemed an integral and natural part of the story, here it seems to be just thrown in to make the series more “edgy.” This is especially apparent during a laughably dumb levitating sex scene with two of Quintin’s classmates. It doesn’t serve any narrative purpose other than to show two attractive people having sex in midair. Another scene that seems to have misplaced sex appeal involves Julia. A stranger, who we soon learn offers an alternate door to learning magic outside of Brakebills, attacks her in the bathroom. Supposedly, he is trying to provoke her into displaying her innate magical abilities, but it also involves the slow removal of her shirt buttons and the subsequent ripping off of her shirt entirely. The scene is implying a possible sexual assault but also tries to make it seem sexy and provocative at the same time. Icky.

    While it may seem like I ripped the pilot apart, there were some things that I really did like. I like the character of Quintin as outsider finally finding his place in the world, and I like that Julia, who in the books really falls by the wayside until much later on, is given her own parallel story of learning magic from possibly nefarious forces from the outset. And as I said before, the last five minutes were excellent and showed a lot of promise for what the series could become. The Beast was represented perfectly, the violence level was flawless to show The Beast’s menace, and it left me excited to see how Quintin will deal with the Beast in the next episode. So despite the unevenness of the pilot, sign me up for Episode 2.

    APPIP ERROR: amazonproducts[
    AccessDeniedAwsUsers|The Access Key Id AKIAIIK4RQAHE2XK6RNA is not enabled for accessing this version of Product Advertising API. Please migrate your credentials as referred here https://webservices.amazon.com/paapi5/documentation/migrating-your-product-advertising-api-account-from-your-aws-account.html.
    ]
    (Visited 161 times, 1 visits today)

    Related

    Allison MatternJason RalphLev GrossmanThe Magicians

    FacebookTwitterPinterestEmail
    Previous Drive-In Saturday: Soylent Green (1973)
    Next Second Chance 1.01“A Suitable Donor”
    monsterid
    Allison Mattern
    Teacher of Reality
    Allison Mattern is a high school English teacher who shamelessly loves reality television. She's a dog person, but owns three cats because she's lazy and they're easier to take care of. She spends most of her free time grading papers, but sometimes gets to watch her favorite shows, and sometimes she gets to write about them.

    Related Posts

    Another Take: Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (2016)

    Allison Mattern
    Movies
    November 21, 2016

    Psycho Drive-In All-Stars: Captain America: Civil War

    Alex Wolfe, Allison Mattern, Jeffrey Roth, John E. Meredith, Rick Shingler, Shawn Hill
    Shot for Shot
    May 11, 2016

    Daily Top Ten

    • superman-headerSuperman (2025) by Nate Zoebl
    • 2001Lost in Translation: The History of Adaptations, 1960-69 by Scott Delahunt
    • men-in-blackLost in Translation: The History of Adaptations, 1990-99 by Scott Delahunt
    • x-files-4-3-headerAll Binge… No Purge: The X-Files S4 Part Three by Rick Shingler
    • Luther-401-13 copyLuther 4.01 by Kelvin Green
    • carry-on-cleo-headerLost in Translation 458: Carry On Cleo (1964) by Scott Delahunt
    • i-spit-on-your-grave-09The Final Girl: I Spit on Your Grave (2010) by The Final Girl
    • goldfinger-headerLost in Translation: The Bond Project – Goldfinger by Scott Delahunt
    • gi-joe-zartanAnything Joes: ZARTAN UNBOXED! | Hiya Toys 1:18 G.I.… by Greg Engle
    • StalloneJudge Dredd (1995) Blu-ray Review by Jason Sacks
    400x400 GI Joe Funko Banner

    Weekly Top Ten

    • i-spit-on-your-grave-09The Final Girl: I Spit on Your Grave (2010) by The Final Girl
    • superman-headerSuperman (2025) by Nate Zoebl
    • babylon-5-blu-ray-04Babylon 5 Complete Series Blu-ray Review by Paul Brian McCoy
    • men-in-blackLost in Translation: The History of Adaptations, 1990-99 by Scott Delahunt
    • 80s-headerLost in Translation: The History of Adaptations, 1980-89 by Scott Delahunt
    • 2001Lost in Translation: The History of Adaptations, 1960-69 by Scott Delahunt
    • AT606-visionAdventure Time 6.06 “Breezy” by Dave Hearn
    • star-wars-headerLost in Translation: The History of Adaptations, 1970-79 by Scott Delahunt
    • a-knights-tale-06Lost in Translation 407: A Knight’s Tale (2001) by Scott Delahunt
    • mary-shelleys-frankenstein-headerEZMM 2024 Day 4: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1994) by Paul Brian McCoy

    psychodrivein

    We came here to chew bubblegum and write intelligent reviews and commentary on cult TV and movies! And we're all out of bubblegum!

    Today at https://psychodrivein.com The Psycho Dri Today at https://psychodrivein.com

The Psycho Drive-In Podcast 07: Superman (2025)

Join Paul and John on the Psycho Drive-In Podcast as they delve into the first official DC Universe live-action film release, Superman!
—
Listen to the boys at the link in our profile!

#PsychoDriveIn #PsychoDriveInPodcast #Podcast #Superman #JamesGunn #DavidCorenswet #RachelBrosnahan #NicholasHoult #DCU #DC
    Today at https://psychodrivein.com Lost in Transl Today at https://psychodrivein.com

Lost in Translation 483: One More Trailer

The Fantastic Four: First Steps is a period piece set in the 60s, around the time the comic was first published.
—
Read more of Scott’s article at the link in our profile!

#LostInTranslation #FantasticFour #FantasticFourFirstSteps #MarvelStudios #MCU
    Today at https://psychodrivein.com Superman (2025 Today at https://psychodrivein.com

Superman (2025)

Superman is proof that the DC film universe might actually have the perfect person in charge of charting their cross-franchise courses.
—
Read more of Nate’s review at the link in our profile!

#Superman #JamesGunn #DavidCorenswet #RachelBrosnahan #NicholasHoult #DC #DCU
    Today at https://psychodrivein.com Lost in Transl Today at https://psychodrivein.com

Lost in Translation 482: Examining Recent Trailers

Two new trailers dropped that are of interest to Lost in Translation: Spaceballs 2 and The Naked Gun!
—
Read more of Scott’s article at the link in our profile!

#LostInTranslation #Spaceballs2 #TheNakedGun #Trailers
    Today at https://psychodrivein.com Final Destinat Today at https://psychodrivein.com

Final Destination: Bloodlines (2025)

FINAL DESTINATION: BLOODLINES is a return to form for a franchise that never should have been on the brink of death.
—
Read more of Nate’s review at the link in our profile!

#FinalDestination #FinalDestinationBloodlines #AdamBStein #ZachLipovsky #KaitlynSantaJuana #TonyTodd
    Today at https://psychodrivein.com Anything Joes: Today at https://psychodrivein.com

Anything Joes: S02E29 - File Card Focus: Big Boa
 
Greg and Jaren return to take a hard look at Cobra’s one-man trainer: Big Boa! 
—
Watch the @AnythingJoesPod gang at the link in our profile!

#AnythingJoes #GIJoe #Cobra #BigBoa #FileCardFocus
    Today at https://psychodrivein.com The Psycho Dri Today at https://psychodrivein.com

The Psycho Drive-In Podcast: 28 Years Later

Paul and John are back with a new PSYCHO DRIVE-IN PODCAST with a brand-new review of 28 YEARS LATER plus a look back at the franchise, its themes, its innovations, and its impact on the genre!
—
Listen to the guys at the link in our profile!

#ThePsychoDriveInPodcast #28YearsLater #28WeeksLater #28DaysLater #DannyBoyle #AlexGarland #AlfieWilliams
 #AaronTaylorJohnson #JodieComer #RalphFiennes
    Today at https://psychodrivein.com Anything Joes: Today at https://psychodrivein.com

Anything Joes: Backstock Blacksite - Night Specter (2008)

In Backstock Blacksite, we open the classified crates and dig deep into Greg’s personal G.I. Joe overflow closet, where extras, variants, and forgotten figures wait to be unearthed.
—
@anythingjoespod #AnythingJoes #GIJoe #GIJoeClassified #NightSpecter #BackstockBlacksite
    Today at https://psychodrivein.com Predator: Kill Today at https://psychodrivein.com

Predator: Killer of Killers (2025)

With Predator: Killer of Killers, Predator fans are feasting, baby!!
—
Read more of Paul’s review at the link in our profile!

#Predator #PredatorKillerOfKillers #KillerOfKillers #DanTrachtenberg #LindsayLaVanchy #DamienCHaas #LouisOzawa #RickGonzalez #MichaelBiehn #JoshuaWassung #MichoRobertRutare
    Follow on Instagram

    Look Who's Talking

    Shawn EH
    Shawn EH - 5/4/2025
    Thunderbolts* (2025)
    Yep, very well done; avoiding the big flashy battle that these heroes (can any of you fly?)...
    Ideonova
    Ideonova - 12/26/2024
    Page to Screen: F. Paul Wilson’s The Keep
    Not living up to the source material? What source material? The book is a predictable, at times...
    Fred L. Taulbee Jr.
    Fred L. Taulbee Jr. - 8/17/2024
    Cahiers du Horror 03: Frank Henenlotter and The Brain that Wouldn’t Die
    I need to see that again. Maybe make it a double feature with All of Me. Steve Martin is someone you...
    RSSTwitterFacebookinstagramtumblr

    Archives

    Large_rectangle_336X280
    • PDI Press
      • PDI Press Catalog
      • PDI Press Writers
        • Fiction
    • Columns A-D
      • A Fistful of Dollar Comics
      • ABCs of Horror
      • All Binge… No Purge
      • Anything Joes
      • Beautiful Creatures
      • Big Eyes Smart Mouth
      • Big Sleeps and Long Goodbyes
      • Cahiers du Horror
      • Dispatches From the Field
      • Drive-In Saturday
      • Dungeons & D-Listers
    • Columns F-P
      • The Final Girl
      • First Looks… Second Thoughts
      • The Flesh is Weak
      • Innocence and Experience
      • Lost in Translation
      • Marvel at the Movies
      • Muppets 101
      • Page to Screen
      • Popcorn Cinema
      • The Psycho Drive-In Podcast
      • Psycho Essentials: The ’80s!
    • Columns S-Z
      • Schlock & Awe
      • Shakespeare on Film
      • Shot for Shot
      • Sick Flix
      • Unnatural Selections
      • Versus
      • Video Word Made Flesh
      • We Got Lists
      • Women in Horror
      • The Xeno File
      • Zombies 101
    • Reviews
      • Books
      • Comics
      • DVD/Blu-ray
      • Movies
      • TV
      • Series
    • Interviews
    • News
      • Trailers
    • Psychos
    • Shop
    • PDI Press
      • PDI Press Catalog
      • PDI Press Writers
        • Fiction
    • Columns A-D
      • A Fistful of Dollar Comics
      • ABCs of Horror
      • All Binge… No Purge
      • Anything Joes
      • Beautiful Creatures
      • Big Eyes Smart Mouth
      • Big Sleeps and Long Goodbyes
      • Cahiers du Horror
      • Dispatches From the Field
      • Drive-In Saturday
      • Dungeons & D-Listers
    • Columns F-P
      • The Final Girl
      • First Looks… Second Thoughts
      • The Flesh is Weak
      • Innocence and Experience
      • Lost in Translation
      • Marvel at the Movies
      • Muppets 101
      • Page to Screen
      • Popcorn Cinema
      • The Psycho Drive-In Podcast
      • Psycho Essentials: The ’80s!
    • Columns S-Z
      • Schlock & Awe
      • Shakespeare on Film
      • Shot for Shot
      • Sick Flix
      • Unnatural Selections
      • Versus
      • Video Word Made Flesh
      • We Got Lists
      • Women in Horror
      • The Xeno File
      • Zombies 101
    • Reviews
      • Books
      • Comics
      • DVD/Blu-ray
      • Movies
      • TV
      • Series
    • Interviews
    • News
      • Trailers
    • Psychos
    • Shop
    Type to search or hit ESC to close
    See all results
    Username
    Password
    Remember Me
    Lost password?
    Create an account
    Username
    Email
    Cancel
    Enter username or email
    Cancel