No one was more reticent to like The Magicians, SyFy's adaptation of Lev Grossman's "Harry Potter-meets-Rules of Attraction" trilogy which ended its first season yesterday, than me. Like casting a complex spell in Fillory (Grossman's version of a fucked-up Narnia), there were so many ways this show could have gone completely wrong and made a bloody mess of things. First of all, The Magicians novels span a decade in the life of Quentin Coldwater, our young beta-adjacent protagonist who begins the series as a neurotic, card-trick compulsive uber-nerd desperate to get into an Ivy. By the end of the series, he's...well...no spoilers, but he's not that. In the course of the story, Quentin never really becomes a likable protagonist, something which Mr. Grossman told The Observer was only partly based on his own experience as a "intellectually overdeveloped and emotionally immature" adolescent.