I've been watching Motherland: Fort Salem and while I'm not prepared to say it's good yet, I do think it's committed. Committed to centering the sory around women, including having the major romance of the first season be f/f, and committed to the idea that this is a world that took a major left turn 350 years ago and has major cultural and political differences that need to come up on screen.

It's also not big on hand-holding: If you hear a character describe her family as "High Atlantic" you're just going to have to figure out what that means from context.

I keep seeing the ads for it and trying to figure out if I want to watch it. I also kept thinking maybe it was a second season because of how little the trailer did to explain a lot of things. But I think I'll check it out

I just heard about Fort Salem today... Between the witches and the f/f it's getting intriguing.

Askye, no it's still the first season. This post has a good overview, although there's a little fangirling:

[link]

Okay, I got the ebook of The Magicians from the library because I forgot so damn much of it and wanted to compare it to the show, and holy crap, right from the first page Quentin is a total shit* AND I forgot they were high-school seniors (WTF). Syfy definitely made the right choice in aging them up.

*(I'm not saying that show!Quentin *isn't* a shit, but he's infinitely more endearing.)

Yeah, I noped out of LG's "The Magicians" no less than six times before I finally, begrudgingly, read it -- and that was only because I had watched enough of the show that I was morbidly curious about the differences. Hated the book. Hated Book!Quentin. Still haven't been able to read the subsequent two novels.

And I noped out of season 5 of the Magicians because of the end of S4; I was very in love with the show and it broke my heart nearly irreparably.

There's very little I remember from the first 2 books (never read the third), except for Julia's story arc in the second book, which is basically her story arc in TV S1. I LOVED her story arc so much -- and then when it got to the Reynard of it all, I threw the book across the room, because god DAMN.

I'm completely spoiled through the end of S5, and I'm not looking forward to the end of S4, but I expect I'll watch S5.

Yeah, that's what noped me out of season 1 of the Magicians originally, but then it a bunch of my friends got into it and it was really good... IDK, I suspect I'll probably watch s5 eventually but with a definite sense of cynicism. It sucked a lot because I really loved the ensemble, and in particular the actors, who were fantastic and did not deserve what the show did to them.

I binged the series fairly quickly. There was much eyerolling, except when I remembered Tom's advice to view it as a comedy, which helped. Margot, Eliot, and Josh made it the most fun for me, although now that I think back Penny was not so hard on the eyes either. So yeah, the actors kept me clicking next episode.

So recent episodes of Motherland: Fort Salem have made it clearer what the underlying story is. Stop me if you've heard this one:

A small subgroup of humanity has physical differences that give them special powers. There's a struggle going on between two factions with ideological differences over how they should relate to the larger population. One faction is working towards assimilation, with emphasis on how useful the special group can be. The other is violently separatist, including attempting to foment a race war between the special group and the rest of the humans. Meanwhile, small populations of the special group are caught in the middle.