Tracing a TV Story Line: The Librarians

Portland, Oregon is all agog.  TNT has greenlighted a new television series, The Librarians, and hopes are high that it will be filmed in and around the city.  In fact, the show's producer set his last television series, Leverage, in Portland.

My first thought when I read this news was, wow, those TV people can make a program out of anything.  I actually worked part-time in Portland's library one year during high school.  The job was fine, but nothing I saw there struck me as grist for a dramatic series.

But I got it wrong.  The Librarians is patterned after several television movies aired by TNT in the aughts.  Here are a couple posters for those movies:

No fussy, shushing librarians here.

The star of the movies, as you can see,
was Noah Wyle, who also will be featured in television series.

The Oregonian newspaper quotes the blog TVLine on the series premise:

The show "centers on four ordinary people with extraordinary talents who discover that they have been selected by Wyle's Flynn to work for The Library, an ancient fellowship of knowledge and heroism.  The quartet
travels the world investigating strange occurrences, battling ancient conspiracies and protecting the innocent from the dangerous secret world of magic."

Well, there you have it.  With a concept like that, Portland would be as good as any city, and possibly better than most for such a program.  Think of all the nutty characters on Portlandia, the comedy now set in the city.  Put some of those folks in Goth costumes, and you're all set.

I scrolled around the internet for a while, browsing viewer discussions.  Several people mentioned that The Librarians sounded a lot like Warehouse 13, a SYFY program  about "government agents tasked with recovering artifacts of supernatural or super-scientific origin."  That program ran from 2009 to 2013, when it was cancelled, perhaps leaving a hole in the market for The Librarians to fill.

Actually the new show's concept sounded familiar to me too, and not because I ever watched the earlier program on SYFY.

I puzzled for a while, and finally it came to me.

The inspiration for The Librarians is the Magic Tree House series by Mary Pope Osborne!

If you have been acquainted with a child anytime in the last 20 years, you are familiar with these early-reader chapter books.  There are about a zillion of them -- okay, only 51 so far -- and Ms. Pope Osborne just keeps churning them out.

The concept of the first 28 books is that a brother and sister are enlisted by Morgan LeFay, the sorceress of Arthurian legend, and fitted out with -- of course -- a magic tree house.  The children travel through time and across geography to free Morgan LeFay from a spell, solve four ancient riddles and save four ancient stories from being lost forever.

The children's adventures sound rather like the challenges facing the actors in the new television series.

And there's more:  During the course of these books, the boy and girl become  -- get this -- Master Librarians!  See?

Here is the Amazon description of the second Magic Tree House book,
The Knight at Dawn:

"Peacocks at dinner and boys in skirts?  That's what Jack and Annie find when the Magic Tree House whisks them back to the Middle Ages for another wild adventure.  In the Great Gall of the castle, a feast is under way.  But Jack and Annie aren't exactly welcome guests."

What a setup!  Story questions galore.  No eight-year-old could resist a book like that.

The MTH series has been very successful and is credited with inspiring many, many children to read.  More than 70 million Magic Tree House books have been sold in the United States alone; the books also are marketed in 30 other countries.

No wonder TNT wanted to get in on that action.