My favorite book-to-screen adaptation is “A Discovery of Witches,” a fantasy TV series produced by the British production companies Bad Wolf and Sky Studios, based on the novels  in the “All Souls” trilogy by Deborah Harkness, and released between 2018 and 2022. 

The protagonist, Diana Bishop, just so happens to be a stunningly brilliant historian whose work focuses on 17th-century alchemy and the history of science, using a rational approach to study subjects connected to early science and magic. At the same time, she is a covert witch herself, who is only beginning to realize how her academic work connects to her magic. 

The discovery, in question, is a minority report of sorts on the origins of all magical creatures hidden in the bowels of the equally stunning library—quite naturally! It is not only the book that is full of magical creatures, not available back at home in New Haven, where she is a tenured professor at Yale, but it also leads to her real-world encounters with vampires, daemons, and witches, who are, let’s just say, up to no good! It’s not all darkness and danger lurking around every corner.

Through the figure of the Oxford geneticist and vampire Matthew Clairmont, a rival for the same lost book, Diana embarks on a different sort of quest to find her true place in this world through a forbidden love that emerges as she forms an initial alliance with him to locate its missing pages.

What is mesmerizing is not just the developing chemistry between the two leads, obvious for this sort of genre, but how the vastly changing physical and natural world of England is made a prominent character in the series, and how changing alliances are captured in very subtle ways by the outstanding performances of its supporting cast, who are arguably as or more accomplished actors than their leads, Teresa Palmer (Diana) and Matthew Goode (Matthew). 

Luminaries featured in the series include Alex Kingston (Sarah Bishop), Trevor Eve (Gerbert D’Aurillac), Lindsay Duncan (Ysabeau De Clermont), Tanya Moodi (Agatha Wilson), Edward Bluemel (Marcus Whitmore) and the list goes on.

The story is far better for those who initially read the books; it’s active world-making that makes watching so deliciously satisfying. The full series is available now on Netflix.

About the writer

Stephanie Polsky dreams of a life chasing pages in the Bodleian Library, but for now mostly spends her timing writing academic texts from her home recliner. She asks readers to direct their magic to her to achieve the former.