![]() Periodically, it’ll offer a delightful sequence scored to an interesting song: say, two assassins (Mary J. The 10-episode first season of Umbrella Academy suggests a musical trapped in the body of one of Netflix’s more tedious Marvel Comics vigilante dramas. ![]() Still, despite early promise, only one of these two series is fully ready to let its freak flag fly, and is much better for it. In a genre that TV often opts to take much too seriously, that donkey - and many of the other unusual elements of these shows felt like sweet, bemusing relief. Now, though, the medium is apparently safe for the likes of Doom Patrol‘s Negative Man, a disfigured former test pilot named Larry Trainor who wears head-to-toe bandages and can release a being made of pure energy over which he has no control.Īnd, yes, there’s a farting donkey that’s also a portal to another dimension. Both shows feature characters so strange it’s hard to imagine TV allowing them over the border even five years ago. ![]() Doom Patrol draws on bits and pieces of 56 years worth of comics (including a recent stint written by Way) in telling the story of a group of freaks brought together to protect a world that otherwise fears and mocks them. Umbrella Academy, based on the Dark Horse comic co-created by My Chemical Romance’s Gerard Way, involves a family of former child superheroes who reunite after the death of their adoptive father, only to discover that they have a few days to prevent the end of the world. A few years back, NBC tried a workplace sitcom, Powerless, set at an unglamorous division of one of Bruce Wayne’s companies it didn’t quite work, but it suggested TV might be more flexible with its superhero adaptations than would have seemed possible back in the days when Smallville had its “no tights, no flights” rule. The CW’s DC Comics shows regularly cross over with one another, with characters leaping from one parallel world to the next without much exposition beyond “Somebody go to Earth-38 to pick up Supergirl.” Social commentary quickly became an accepted part of the toolkit on the likes of Black Lightning, Luke Cage and Jessica Jones. In time, though, the executives who green-light these series, as well as their producers, have become more comfortable embracing the trappings of the source material - and expanding the kinds of stories that can be adapted. that were barely distinguishable from that night’s NCIS.) (When Marvel broke into TV a year after Arrow, there were some Season One episodes of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. Even though the big-screen adventures of Iron Man and friends had already proved that audiences could just go with this stuff, television took a more cautious approach to the material. In those early days, when Oliver Queen was running around without a mask and only being called “the vigilante,” there was a sense that the people adapting comic books for the small screen felt they had to hold viewers’ hands through the whole concept. We’re nearly seven years into the modern TV superhero-drama boom, which began with the CW’s Arrow. ![]() It was when half the Doom Patrol traveled through a flatulent donkey to another dimension that I realized a line had been crossed. ![]()
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