Stars on screen
Screen magic: It has a school where young men and women are recruited and trained to become wizards. It has magical spells, deadly beasts and a mystical world.And no, it isn’t Harry Potter. “The Magicians” is back for a second season beginning Wednesday, Jan. 25, on Syfy, after its stellar first run won it critical praise and lots of audience love.
While it may have some parallels to that other wizarding school franchise, “The Magicians” is its own fantastic beast. Based on the book series by Lev Grossman, the show follows Quentin Coldwater (Jason Ralph, “Aquarius”), a young man who’s obsessed with a series of fantasy novels.When he’s interviewed and accepted to a college that he’s never heard of — Brakebills University — he learns to his shock that magic is very real, and so is the magical world explored in the books.
Olivia Taylor Dudley (“Paranormal Activity:The Ghost Dimension,” 2015) stars as Quentin’s love interest,Alice, and Stella Maeve (“Chicago P.D.”) stars as his best friend, Julia, who was rejected by Brakebills despite showing some level of magical aptitude, forcing her to seek training in the sorcerous arts elsewhere.
Hale Appleman (“Smash”), Summer Bishil (“The Last Airbender,” 2010) and Jade Tailor (“Murder in the First”) help round out the cast as the other students and their friends.
By the end of the first season, Quentin and his friends had found their way to Fillory, the magical realm described in the novels that he loves, where they faced a deadly beast with a devastating secret.With that season ending on a dramatic note and with countless plot lines left dangling tantalizingly, the second season of “The Magicians” has a stable foundation set for another action-packed run. Season 2 of “The Magicians” premieres Wednesday, Jan. 25, on Syfy.
Nature, defined: It’s time to put that new ultra-high-definition TV that was under the Christmas tree through its paces.The sequel to the BBC’s 2006 nature documentary “Planet Earth” hits TV screens Saturday, Jan. 28, with eye-popping 4K visuals of some of the most beautiful, terrifying and awe-inspiring natural phenomena that our planet has to offer.
Even homes without the latest and greatest in television technology won’t want to miss what U.K. online newspaper The Independent’s Christopher Hooton has called “the greatest TV nature documentary to date.”
Filmed by the U.K.’s BBC and airing here on BBC America, each episode takes a look at the creatures that inhabit the many corners of the planet, peering into a different sort of habitat, beginning with islands and moving through mountains, deserts, jungles and even cities.
Naturalist and broadcaster David Attenborough returns as the show’s narrator, a role that he also filled in the original “Planet Earth” series.
The first “Planet Earth” aired in 2006, and was at the time the most expensive nature documentary ever produced by the BBC. It was also the first to be filmed in high definition, and the series’s runaway success and critical acclaim helped show off the stunning visuals that were achievable with the new television standard.
With “Planet Earth II” now doing the same, but using the current 4K standard, the filmmakers have somehow managed to make the natural world look even more breathtaking than the first series.
“Planet Earth II” has already blown away viewers in the U.K., and viewers on this side of the Atlantic finally get to feast their own eyes starting Saturday, Jan. 28.