Fantastic Fantasy, my Review of Mitsfits
Let me take you back four years in time. No, not literally, you dolts, it’s a mental exercise…
Anyway, remember when Heroes was coming out on Fox? The promotional material made it look cool. It was going to be X-men, only with a dose of reality added. It was going to be like a comic book with a big budget, a live action version of superheroes. The promotional material gave the impression that it was going to be fun, fast paced, well acted and like Lost, with less foot dragging.
Unfortunately, the promotional material was wrong on all counts, because now all Heroes is is dragging feet. Now when I try and watch heroes, I can’t. I have to change the channel because I feel like I’m getting stupid. Because, you see, saving the cheerleader did not save the world, and once the show failed so spectacularly to deliver on that promise, I stopped giving a crap.
So for those disappointed in Heroes, I offer an alternative. And what a splendid one!
It’s called Misfits, and it’s made by the BBC. Yeah, going all the way across the pond.
It was created and written by Howard Overman, and stars Iwan Rheon, Robert Sheehan, Lauren Socha, Nathan Stewart, and Antonia Thomas,. I’ve heard of exactly none of these people, but it seems only polite in a review to give credit where credit is due. Maybe you know them.
Anyway, the show is about five punk kids in Britain who are assigned community service for various petty crimes. While there working, a freak storm hits! And they wake up the next morning with… Superpowers!
But let’s move passed that contrivance and get to the real meat of the matter, shall we?
The powers themselves are a mix of been there done that and new. Invisibility for the shy nerd, telepathy for the insecure one, the ability to rewind time for the one who regrets a lot, lust inspiring for the one who likes sex, and no powers, seemingly, although maybe not really, for the sarcastic brash dick.
Now, this might sound boring or trite, and in a few small ways it is. But in many more ways it’s not. The girl who inspires lust, for example, always inspires it with a touch, and she has no way of turning it off. So she can’t ever kiss a guy without him trying to rip all her clothes off and have sex with her where ever they happen to be.
The girl with Telepathy hears people thinking how people want to “shag” her, which means sex, in case you didn’t know. She hears her friends badmouthing her, and she breaks up with her boyfriend because she can’t keep quiet about what she hears.
Now, this was done in Heroes, but that was one interesting element in a stew of Bla. The Misfits is great because there isn’t anything Bla about it.
When four teens get superpowers, what would you suppose they’d do? If you guessed become superheroes, you’d be wrong, at least for now.
Instead what they do is drink and have sex and do some drugs and bicker and sometimes someone reads a stray thought or rewinds time to fix something or turns invisible.
Its not all nothing though. The teens have to contend with fallout from the storm in the form of their dead probation officer.
The probation officer got a power which gave him super strength and incontrollable rage, and was killed by our superpowered teens twenty minutes into the first episode.
The next couple episodes, and most of the season as a hole, deal with the teenagers attempts to hide this crime of self-defense from their new probation officer and the police.
The shows tone is a mix of drama and comity and the balance between the two hasn’t been achieved so well since Firefly. Serious situations can suddenly turn hilarious, and vice versa. The humor isn’t diminished by serious moments, and the serious moments are only enhanced when they happen to turn humorous.
The show’s writers have a grasp on their characters, and after the first episode, people act in believable ways, and deal with each other as real kids would. The group isn’t suddenly a band of brothers or fast friends, they tolerate each other. It’s looking like they’ll be united, but it hasn’t happened yet.
I’d also like to praise the cast. The main actors are all very good, with props going out to Simon and Nathan Especially. But the guest stars are all superb as well; there isn’t one bad actor in the bunch.
If you aren’t familiar with shows produced by the BBC, there are two things you should know.
The first is that the BBC isn’t constrained by the censorship that constrains broadcast networks in this country which means people do drugs on screen without suffering a karmic death five minutes later, and there’s also a fair lot of swearing and almost as much sex. But don’t think the shows pornographic, or at least don’t think that when it is it somehow feels cheapened for being that way.
The second thing that is important to note is that British seasons of television tend to run for a shorter episode run than do American seasons, and Misfits is a striking example of this, having only six episodes in its first season.
But this is fine, as not a second is wasted. The show, in its short first season, exemplifies what American Television, (with the exception of reality shows,) is obviously heading towards, i.e., a story told in the length of a season, or in the length of an entire show.
You can watch a random episode of the Misfits without being totally lost, “teens have superpowers,” is really all you need to know, but the show is twice as good if you watch it in order.
Now, about watching it. It’s a British show, and as far as I know and as far as Wikipedia knows, it hasn’t been broadcast anywhere else, and it hasn’t been released on DVD. And that’s a damn shame.
And the worst part is there isn’t anything you can do about it. You certainly can’t go to a bit torrent sight such as the pirate bay, and you certainly can’t run a search for “misfits” and you then certainly can’t download a torrent which will allow you to watch the show. You can’t do that, I certainly most definitely did not do that, because its illegal and its copyright infringement and no one should do what I’ve just described.
If you do, though, you’ll be in for a great six or seven hours of television. I can’t wait until the second season airs. The show has created an intriguing world, and while the season answers the questions it posed, new questions are raised in the last two episodes and the pace of the series leads me to believe that these new questions will be answered, rather than spun out to get ratings.
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