New BBC period drama Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell blurs history and magic, explain the cast and creators.
It's based on a popular book that involves magic. It's set in an imaginary past and comes with notable British actors among its ranks.
So is Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell the new Game of Thrones?
Well, where Game of Thrones alludes to history, specifically to the Wars of the Roses, Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell is alternative history, one in which the characters intervene in events like the Napoleonic Wars.
Game of Thrones is grim, and although Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell - adapted from the book by Susanna Clarke - shares a dark sense of magic, it's also a very funny social satire that pokes particular fun at academics.
And where Game of Thrones is epic, Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, the story of the fussy, middle-class magician Mr Norrell (Eddie Marsan) and the talented, upper-class dilettante magician Jonathan Strange (Bertie Carvel), is intimate.
It's also a miniseries, rather than an ongoing show. But taken together, they are fascinating examples of how to play with the past, and how the supernatural helps us see our mundane dilemmas in a clear light.
"I look at this story as a story about a moment in our cultural history when the projects of the Enlightenment basically won the debate, and we no longer believe in magic as a society," Carvel says.
"That moment really existed in our history, before history rewrote itself and decided that magic never existed. There was a time when the people who were at the cutting edge of science were also doing alchemy and were also looking at astrology and trying to understand the world in different ways. And this story, quite cleverly, imagines what would have happened if they'd just gone along a slightly different path.
"We've come back, in the 21st century, to a point where people are realising the limits of science to explain - it might not eventually have limits - but it can't solve the universe for us. And I think that's why we're seeing such curiosity about stories about magic, about fantasy and so on.
"Our story goes left when the real world went right, but we've met back on the same road, and people are curious to see how the imagination can change the world."
Director Toby Haynes and writer Peter Harness suggest that Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell "is a story of two relatively privileged men coming to terms with the consequences of their actions, and with the idea that their magic has ushered into being a world in which they are less important.
"It's the beginning of the age of revolutions, and magic is a revolution, in a strange way," says Harness. "You end the book with the possibilities of black emancipation, women's emancipation and poor people's emancipation. And all these things are bubbling quietly underneath it."
Charlotte Riley plays Jonathan Strange's wife, Arabella, who gets a more prominent role in the show than she did in the book.
Things get tricky for her when a sinister faery takes a shine to her.
Riley says she had been particularly touched by the plight of Lady Pole (played by Alice Englert), a noblewoman kidnapped into a magical realm.
Lady Pole's experiences parallel the medical and psychological complaints women experienced in earlier eras, but that were dismissed as fantasy and hysteria.
"Arabella understands that the etiquette has to be upheld, but is trying to appeal to the men in the story, saying 'You need to do something to help her', and is constantly ignored and constantly pushed aside," says Riley.
"It's so easy for all the men to sweep that aside and lock her away and hope that the problem just disappears. A lot of the story is activated by the fact that women don't do what they're meant to be doing at that time."
Class politics inform Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, too. Stephen Black (Ariyon Bakare), Lady Pole's butler, is promised by the faery that he will be elevated socially beyond his wildest dreams. And Strange and Norrell's approaches to magic are shaped by their origins.
Charlotte Ripley in Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell.
"I think he has the easy arrogance of the British upper class," Carvel suggests of Strange, who begins pursuing magic largely because Arabella wants him to have a vocation, "whereas Norrell has much more of the insecurity of the middle class and is much more judgmental because he is not so secure in his own position in the world. He's hoarding knowledge because he's afraid that someone else will have it. Strange, he's a chancer, really. He's not worried about things, he's not worried about money, he's freer.
"But one of the things that makes him a sympathetic character is that in this era of great social change, he's a Whig, not a Tory. He's essentially a revolutionary. What he does with his magic is to try to make it accessible to everybody, whereas Norrell is trying to keep the riches for himself.
Marsan sees the relationship between Strange and Norrell as having psychological and historic parallels.
"Susannna told me that Norrell and Strange represent both sides of the brain and that magic is the part of our subconscious that is creative, despite of ourselves. If you use the analogy of magic being music then Norrell is Salieri, analytical, disciplined and repressed. Magic comes to him fleetingly, only after years of study. Strange is Amadeus, spontaneous, creative and reckless. It comes easily to him. Norrell is in awe of Strange. He's jealous of him and yet wants to possess him.
The dynamics of this relationship makes the series transcend the fantasy genre."
Adds Carvel: "Strange and Norrell are two sides of a coin: in many ways they could not be more different, and yet they are bound together. One is led by reason, the other by instinct. They are friends as well as enemies, equals as well as rivals."
What: Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell Where and when: SoHo, Tuesdays 8.30pm (from July 14); Thursday 7.30pm (from July 16)
