In the US: Mondays, 9/8c, Fox
In the UK: Sundays, 9pm, Fox UK. Starts October 8
You have to hand it to Marvel. Having a few critical failures isn’t stopping them from marching on regardless, mining decades of comics for new TV shows. Sure, the shiny lustre has come off its Netflix shows, tarnished by the second season of Marvel’s Daredevil, Marvel’s Iron Fist (why? It’s great) and Marvel’s The Defender’s. Its ABC shows are pretty ropey (Marvel’s Inhumans), cancelled (Marvel’s Agent Carter) or lurching along like a zombie that should have already died (Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD).
But the X-Men keep it going. Sure, that’s without actually including any X-Men, but X-Men-free X-Men shows seem to be working for it. This year, we’ve already had the truly magnificent Legion, one of 2017’s best new TV shows and so auteured by Noah Hawley you’d really have to work hard to spot it’s an X-Men show.
The Gifted
Now we have The Gifted, which comes from the pen of Matt Nix (Burn Notice, The Good Guys) and which doesn’t feature even one X-Man. Although it does mention them and include their ringtone.
It sees Stephen Moyer (Ultraviolet, True Blood, The Bastard Executioner) and Amy Acker (Angel, Person of Interest) playing a happily married couple in a post-X-Men universe – that is, the X-Men and the Brotherhood of Mutants appear to have disappeared somewhere after a 9/11-style event that saw lots and lots of people killed. Not all the world’s mutants have disappeared, though, and the government’s so hacked off, it’s set up all kinds of laws and agencies to police mutants, keep them under control and make sure they don’t go around killing people. Moyer is also a district attorney charged with dealing with rebel mutants, although he tries not to think too hard about what happens to them once they go through the system.
Acker and Moyer have two teenage kids: the popular Natalie Alyn Lind and the bullied loner Percy Hynes White. Wouldn’t you know it, they’re mutants! Oh noes. And when White accidentally comes into his new powers quite publicly, it’s not long before Coby Bell (Burn Notice) from Sentinel Services is at Acker and Moyer’s door, looking to bring them both in.
What’s a futuristic police state family to do, hey?
Here’s the first six minutes, followed by a trailer