Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Fate: The Winx Saga’ On Netflix, Where A Group Of Teenage Fairies Figure Out How To Be Teenagers … And Fairies

We’re not sure when this started happening — maybe with Riverdale? — but there seems to be a rash of “dark, gritty, more adult” reboots of kids’ cartoons or comics. Even when they’re not completely stupid, the trend is still tiring because it introduces conflict in places where there really was none in the original material. This is the case with Fate: The Winx Saga, based on the Italian cartoon series Winx Club, about a group of friends at a fairy school. Read on for more…

FATE: THE WINX SAGA: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: In a wooded area, an older man comes out to pen up his loose flock of sheep. “Feckin’ sheep!” he says.

The Gist: The man moves outside a force field to find the sheep; there, he’s attacked by some sort of monster or animal.

We then see a school campus; Bloom (Abigail Cowen) is moving into Alfea, a boarding school for fairies and specialists (male fairies) in the Otherworld. The first person she talks to is a specialist named Sky (Danny Griffin), who finds out that Bloom is from the “realm” of California (i.e. not from the Otherworld) and that, three months ago, she had no idea she was a fairy.

She meets her roommates, including the very popular Stella (Hannah van der Westhuysen), who is assigned to be her mentor. She tells Bloom that fairies’ magic is dictated by emotions, and it’s the control of those emotions that’s the key. Every one of her other roommates has a different power: Bloom can generate fire; Aisha (Precious Mustapha) controls water; Musa (Elisha Applebaum) is an empath; Terra (Eliot Salt), who grew up at the school because her father works in the greenhouse, can manipulate plants.

Headmistress Farah Dowling (Eve Best) tells Bloom that she had “no other choice” but to be there; as much as Bloom wants to learn to control her powers then go back home, Dowling thinks that Bloom can be among the grads that “shape the Otherworld” if she embraces the learning process.

There’s a reason why there’s a barrier around the campus; outside that barrier lurks creatures called Burned Ones, intent on attacking anyone who comes through. Bloom goes outside that barrier in order to figure out how to control her powers; at various points, she flashes back to life at home right before she left, when she got so angry with her demanding mother (Eva Birthistle) that she actually managed to set fire to her parents’ bedroom, almost killing her mom. Aisha happens by when Bloom tries to control her fire power, and prevents her from starting a brush fire.

After talking with Bloom, who claims there isn’t any fairies in her family lineage, Aisha speculates that Bloom is a changeling, a fairy who was swapped for a human baby in the “real world”. It’s an exceedingly rare and dangerous bridge to the real world. Stella, jealous of the attention her ex Sky is giving Bloom, gives Bloom her portal-opening ring when Bloom expresses some homesickness. After she visits, she encounters a Burned One right by the portal. Dowling takes care of the being for her, leaving it in the “real world”.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Fate: The Winx Saga is based on Iginio Straffi’s cartoon series Winx Club; it feels like if you took that show and mixed it with something more adult, like Pretty Little Liars, you get Fate.

Our Take: Fate: The Winx Saga, created by Brian Young (The Vampire Diaries), is a bit dumb in places, and feels like a show that would feel comfortable on The CW’s schedule instead of on Netflix. It’s not awful by any means, but it also just left us shrugging by the end of the first episode, wondering if the show could have benefitted from a smaller cast and a bit more character development.

The cast is actually much bigger than what we went over in the Gist section, because there’s a series of Specialists that we just barely get to know. There’s a troublemaking specialist named Riven (Freddie Thorp) who makes cheap jokes about Terra’s weight, and there’s a sweet guy named Dane (Theo Graham) that can’t hold his liquor. There’s also an instructor named Silva (Robert James-Collier) whom Dowling relies on for info on the Burned Ones, but we don’t know a lot about him. Even the rest of the girls that become Bloom’s best buds aren’t much more than archetypes at this point.

Listen, we get that a 53-minute first episode can’t service a cast that large. But by the end of this first episode, we only really know about Bloom, but still have no idea what brought her to Alfea. It feels like we’ll find out this information while working around typical teenage-y storylines about the rest of the girls, like the “misunderstood bitch” that Stella seems to be, the “just wants to be on her own” Musa, or the “gets aggro to combat bullying” Terra. Only Aisha feels like a character that can go someplace interesting, but there’s scant evidence of that in the first episode.

If the focus was just on Bloom and how she figures out if she’s a changeling or not, that might have worked. But the “Scooby gang” approach to this story seems all too familiar, and not at all interesting. It doesn’t help that from what we’ve read about the original cartoon series, the friendship between the girls was genuine and supportive, not this “edgier” model where it seems like everyone is frenemies with each other.

Sex and Skin: Besides seeing Sky with his shirt off, the first episode stays surprisingly chaste.

Parting Shot: Oh, did we mention another character? A mysterious loner of a fairy named Beatrix (Sadie Soverall), who goes to the captured Burned One, wakes it up from its induced slumber and says, “Morning Sunshine.”

Sleeper Star: We want to see more of Eliot Salt as Terra, the only character that wasn’t in the original animated series. She monologues about not being the sweet, fat kid who just takes being bullied. That monologue, and her overall chatty-but-aware-of-it character makes us want to find out more about her.

Most Pilot-y Line: During one of her arguments with her mother, after she took the door of her bedroom away, her mom goes “Every comeback is another week without your door. Hit me.” Oy.

Our Call: SKIP IT. While there’s nothing inherently terrible about Fate: The Winx Saga, there’s nothing about it that stands out. Also, do we need yet another dark and gritty remake of a beloved kids’ series?

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.

Stream Fate: The Winx Saga On Netflix