‘The Magicians’ Obliterated Netflix With One Perfect Joke

Spoilers for The Magicians “Marry F*ck Kill” past this point.

SYFY’s excellent The Magicians is usually pretty pop-culture savvy on a weekly basis, but this week’s episode went for the jugular where one streaming service is concerned. In the midst of a magical escape plan, the show literally paused to allow time for a totally sick burn towards Netflix.

To get you caught up, Alice (Olivia Taylor Dudley) is trying to escape from The Library, the totalitarian organization currently controlling the flow of magic to every dimension. Enter a surprising return face, Christopher Plover (Charles Shaughnessy). Plover is the author of the “Fillory and Further” book series, a collection that’s loosely reminiscent of C.S. Lewis’s “Narnia” books and was based on the real (in the show, at least) adventures of the Chatwin children. In order to write those adventures, Plover got stories from Martin Chatwin, a young boy who he also repeatedly molested.

Alice, when faced with Plover, wants nothing to do with him. But he swears he’s reformed and just wants to find a world to live in where he can no longer do harm. He wants Alice to take him there, and in exchange he’ll give her the info she needs to go to Earth and save Quentin Coldwater (Jason Ralph). She agrees, though eventually sends him to a hell dimension (good!)… But along the way, they hit a curious stumbling block.

The library isn’t just home to every book in existence, it’s also home to the complete story of every person and being who has ever lived. That means in order to figure out that Alice and Plover escaped, or that Alice (maybe) changed Quentin’ destiny, they’d just need to read the appropriate books. That’s when Plover brings up an idea, one he’s used before. He mentions that while on deadline for one of the “Fillory and Further” books, he was also studying magic. He discovered an auto-writing spell that he thinks they can use to keep the books writing false information.

“You feed it a premise,” Plover tells Alice, “and it constructs an airtight storyline. I gather they use it in Hollywood all the time.”

“That explains Netflix,” quips Alice back.

And then they just hold on that beat, to allow the sick, sick burn to settle in.

There are a few things particularly funny about this joke, beyond Alice making with the funny in the direst of circumstances. The first is that The Magicians is run by Sera Gamble, who also runs recent Netflix hit YOU. It’s actually even funnier when you consider that YOU was not created by Netflix at all, but for Lifetime before it moved over to the streaming service to become a Netflix Original for Season 2.

The other thing is… It’s actually true? Not actually true, because magic doesn’t exist and writers do create shows. But Netflix also has its algorithm that analyzes user data to help green-light shows and movies. That’s not the only way they happen, but certainly the running joke is that the Netflix algorithm sees people like something — say, Spanish crime dramas — and the Netflix suits put five more into production, flooding the zone. Like cooking shows? Good news, now there are fifteen more for you to enjoy.

So okay, fine, The Magicians didn’t exactly put Netflix on blast, and the whole episode is a lot more than that one joke, so do check it out. But damn, anyway. Damn.

The Magicians airs Wednesdays at 9/8c on SYFY.

Where to stream The Magicians