These days, it feels you can’t throw a Tesseract without hitting a superhero television show. But Powers, the latest entry in the capes-and-tights genre, isn’t on network TV or cable or even Netflix; it’s the first original show for Sony’s PlayStation Network. It is a big leap forward into original programming for the burgeoning network—and, sadly, also a big misstep.
Based on the much-loved indie comic book series by Brian Michael Bendis and artist Michael Avon Oeming, Powers is primarily the story of Christian Walker (Sharlto Copley), a square-jawed detective beating the streets in a city where the skies are filled with demigods. But there’s also more to Detective Walker than meets the eye; as we soon learn, he doesn’t just police superheroes—he used to be one. Before a tragic and somewhat vague accident claimed his power, he was a nigh-invincible hero named Diamond. It’s a tragic backstory that places him at the fulcrum of the two worlds, allowing him to explore the dark side of both the streets and skies with equal ease.
But while Powers’ comic book precursor was boundary-pushing, its TV counterpart has softened its edges and failed to keep pace with the scores of superhero shows that have come since its debut. Time has not necessarily been kind to Powers—and it shows.
When the comic book series first hit the stands in 2000, its savvy, street-level take on superhero tropes felt like a revelation. It offered not only a fresh, mature-readers-wanted twist on the spandex genre but also a delicious satire of celebrity culture, imagining a world where the heroes flying through the sky suffered all the accompanying drug addictions, pettiness, and sexual misconduct that so often accompany fame. Long before Gotham—and its comic book predecessor, Gotham Central—Powers took the primary-colored world of superheroes and brought it down to earth with a noir police procedural whose clever, rapid-fire dialogue could give Joss Whedon a run for his money.
In the decade since its comic shop debut, however, these sorts of riffs have become de rigeur even in the mainstream comics they originally chopped and screwed—including the comics that Bendis himself went on to write, as he rose from indie darling to a key architect of the modern Marvel Comics superhero universe.
The rise of social media has turned modern-day celebrity culture into what already feels like a super-charged version of its former self, and Powers struggles to catch up to the bleeding edge of celebrity BS, mustering little more than Inside Edition ripoffs and superhero news apps.
Worse, the sharp, rapid-fire dialogue and crackling odd-couple chemistry that still make the Powers comics feel special are almost entirely absent in the pilot (watch it above in full), whittled down to gentle edges that feel indistinguishable from any other superhero show.
Part of the appeal of the square-jawed, brooding Detective Walker was the sense that a fallen demigod always lurked beyond the badge, as though the clothes of his human life were always a little bit too small. Perhaps the worst indictment of Copley as Walker is that he fits into the shoes of his beat cop persona so seamlessly, feeling every bit like Just Another Guy with little gravitas that isn’t generated by his omnipresent aviator shades.
By far the most interesting thing about the show is the way it differs from the comics, especially around its female characters. Although Walker’s first partner, Deena Pilgrim, is a wiry white woman with a blond pixie cut, the Deena we meet on the small screen is black, played by Susan Heyward of The Following fame. Although Walker ends up paired with a black, female partner later in the comic book series, the character we see on the screen isn’t an amalgam of the two, but rather the product of race-blind casting.
But the most dramatic character shift surely belongs to Retro Girl. In the comics, we never actually meet the red-caped heroine. Because she’s dead. (Think of her as the Laura Palmer of the comic series, a magnetic, much-loved teenage girl whose death hangs over the first story arc like a beatific specter.) In the television series, however, Retro Girl is not only very much alive, she’s evolved from a teen into a 40-something woman, played by Michelle Forbes, the superb actress best known for playing Ensign Ro on Star Trek: The Next Generation and Commander Cain in the reimagined Battlestar Galactica.
In her hands, Retro Girl promises to be a powerful presence rather than a negative space—not to mention the rare instance of a mature female hero—and perhaps the one light that cuts through the pervasive feeling that you’ve seen all of this before, and better.
Retro Girl’s appearance in the land of the living also teases the sort of narrative deviation that we’ve seen on comic book adaptations like AMC’s The Walking Dead, where startling shifts from the established story can add unexpected layers to familiar characters that surprise and please even devoted fans.
At first glance, however, Powers suffers not only from a failure to translate its best qualities to the small screen but also a failure to innovate on them, especially as the ever-widening world of superhero television has flourished by doing exactly that. It’s not as comfortably familiar as the slow-burning Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., not as entertaining as The Flash, and not as progressive as the whip-smart Agent Carter. So what is it? Um, dunno.
If Powers aims to escape the long shadow created by the successors to its own source material, it had best start solving that mystery. Fast.
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