The Magicians Showrunner Teases How Series Will End

Syfy’s The Magicians will come to an end in April after five seasons. The news came as a surprise on Tuesday when it was announced that the fan-favorite series’ Season 5 finale would also serve as a series finale. But while the news was a shock to fans, it’s something that executive producers Sera Gamble and John McNamara had a bit of an inkling that things would be ending, something that allowed them to craft an ending that will complete not just the season’s arc, but the series’ journey as well.

“We really spent a lot of time and care in talking not just about how to complete the arc of Season 5, but also asking a lot of questions like, ‘Where was Julia (Stella Maeve) in episode 1? Where was she in episode 2? And what do we want to say about that? Where she is in this episode?’” Gamble told TV Insider. “And so where you see the characters, especially in the final episode, I feel it really says what we wanted to say about their journey into adulthood. Was there more gas in the tank? I mean, I think the show itself sort of speaks to the endless capacity to create with all our partners. The world that Lev Grossman created in his books is so rich, I think there’s like a thousand shows inside of those books. And I only became more convinced when we kind of ran out of plot [from the novels], we have done most of the stories of those three books.”

Gamble went on to explain that she feels good about how things end.

“But the world is so real that I’m not going to lie, we could go off and tell lots of stories about these characters,” Gamble said. “But to put some kind of punctuation at the end of the sentence of this particular show and the journey we’ve been going on with our audience for the last five seasons, we feel pretty good about the season finale. I feel like it is very much in keeping with the spirit of the show.”

An adaptation of Lev Grossman’s trilogy of novels — The Magicians, The Magician King, and The Magician’s Land — the series debuted on December 16, 2015. A grown-up riff of sorts on Harry Potter, the series follows a group of college-age students discovering not only that magic is real, but they end up attending Brakebills University, a secret college for magicians. During their time at Brakebills, they discover that Fillory, the magical realm from a series of children’s books is actually a real alternate dimension. The group becomes the realm’s kings and queens, but magic and fantasy aren’t all they’re cracked up to be and the series consistently challenges many of the elements and tropes of the fantasy genre while also tackling many real-life issues, such as sexuality, mental health, and trauma.

And while it sounds like the series will end in a natural-seeming way, McNamara did explain that efforts were made to find the series a new home. Those efforts just didn’t pan out.

“Yeah, we were aware that it was definitely not going forward on Syfy at that point and that we were then going to want at least to try to make a run on other platforms,” McNamara said.

He further explained that while attempts were made, no suitable home was found, including NBC Universal.

“None of them seemed in the end like a perfect financial or creative fit,” McNamara said. “And so we reluctantly just decided, ‘Well at least we have this season finale that was crafted to also be a series finale.’ It was kind of always going to pull double duty.”

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