COULD a Magnus Archives tv show be made?
SHOULD a Magnus Archives tv show be made?
These are legitimate questions.
The biggest issue in adapting TMA is, quite obviously, the length of it. The main benefit that comes from podcast is that you can reasonably have 200 episodes to craft a story in. With television, however, production would necessitate a huge cut. Meaning entire episodes or statements would need to be removed. Meaning the slow creep of realizations cannot happen. Meaning restructuring of plot beats or character moments. Wheat from chafe and all that. It could be doable. It could even improve things. Unfortunately, with how television shows seem determined not to go beyond 6-10 episodes a season any more, there would be A LOT of sacrifices.
To that point, we can look at the length of episodes as they stand. Given a 45-52 minute runtime in a television episode, you could adapt two or three of the 15-20 minute podcast episodes into one. Especially when adapting season one. Potentially still, for a certain degree, keeping that slow creep. At that point, as previously stated, the most thought would need to be put into what exemplifies and progresses not just the plot but themes of the series. At this time I will not be debating which statements or episodes could be culled. That is for another day.
Continuing on to the statements, there is the question of how to portray them. There is the obvious difference in medium – audio versus visual – and therefore a difference in what it should literally look like. It cannot simply be whoever is acting as Jon sitting at a desk and reading. So. Would they be snippets of visuals with narration overlying it? Would they be fully filmed and acted like any other scene? Would there be any indication of Jon as a watcher or the Fears? Would there be a shift to where Jon, when it is a live statement giver, acts out the statement? Would he be in the background? Unobtrusive at first, then more obvious? Would that obviousness only come to a head during the Eyepocalypse? There would also be the opportunity to fix where the fifth season failed as there would no longer be episode after episode of the same moral conundrums and naval gazing to bloat things out, streamlining things. Less room for emotional exhaustion to sour things.
I haven’t spoken on the metaplot part as that wouldn’t be too much of an issue to handle. A competent writers room can figure out how to structure an episode that balances things out satisfactorily. The main concern in that would be in how to condense those 200 episodes of development in a way that wouldn’t feel unearned and out of nowhere. Especially as the cast list, in a shorter series, would potentially need to be condensed as well. This is what would make or break this hypothetical adaptation. Do you do away with one cop or the other? Do you take away one assistant to better feature another?
Beyond the Archives, what would be done about the marks? The rituals? That is, if the series even gets to that point. Less episodes, less seasons, less time to make any globe-trotting or kidnapping or foreshadowing make sense. Even with the aforementioned combining of podcast episodes into the longer television episodes.
Any conclusion to be drawn from this, and one I can see being why there hasn’t been anything going forward to develop a hypothetical adaption, is that the effort of going back through 200 episodes to beat them into something they weren’t mean to be, is idiotic at best and futile at worse. The show is there, faults and all, and anything that would be ‘fixed’ through an adaptation isn’t worth what would be 'lost’ with all that is stacked against it.