Magic: The Gathering is hard to envision as a TV show. The TCG has thirty years of stories, settings, and characters to pull from. The problem is, though, that a lot of it isn’t cohesive, and the narrative has only been tied together by a main cast of characters in the latter part of its life.
How does a showrunner pick a main character, a setting, and what enemies to use when the Magic Multiverse is full of so much variety and, well, magic? That’s what showrunner Terry Matalas is going to have to figure out. Despite recent reports that the show was canceled, Netflix ran counter to that and reannounced it as part of its Geeked Week. Known for the third season of Star Trek: Picard (generally thought of as ‘the good one’), he will now need to reign in the many iconic planes and characters into something condensed and comprehensible.
That’s going to be hard to achieve, too – history shows it. This project is not new. It was first announced in 2019, with the Russos attached.
That didn’t work out, so next it went to Jeff Kline, who even got as far as casting Brandon Routh as planeswalker Gideon Jura. That, too eventually faded away. Now, we’re at the third bite of the apple.
Matalas has his work cut out if he’s to overcome the project’s production hell — though it is entering production, which suggests things are at least where Kline’s attempt was.. Why is Magic so hard to adapt? The problem with adapting Magic is it’s such a broad property.
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