TV reviews

In the US: Wednesdays, 10pm ET/PT, FX
In the UK: Thursdays, 9pm, Fox UK. Starts tonight

Oh good. Another superhero TV show based on a Marvel comic. Because we’re so strapped for them right now, aren’t we?

Don’t pretend you’re not thinking that, just like me. I know you are. Yes, you. Don’t try to hide. I can see you right there. I so can. We’re thinking the same thoughts.

But Legion is different. Very different. It’s ostensibly based on the Legion comic, which features the somewhat mentally disturbed David Haller (aka Legion), the son of X-Men boss Professor X, who has a different superpower for each of his multiple personalities.

Chuck that fact out the window, though. Just screw it up and throw it out that window right over there next to you. Yes, that one. Which one did you think I meant?

What you have to remember is that this is a show written and directed by Noah Hawley, the creator of Fargo, and this first episode at least is actually more like watching One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest while on LSD.

It stars Dan Stevens (Downton Abbey) as Haller, here a once-promising boy whose life falls apart in his teenage years once he starts to hear the voices and be able to move things with his mind. Or at least he thinks he can (don’t we all?), since he’s subsequently diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and put on medication. After college, though, everything falls apart again and before he knows it, he’s locked away in a mental hospital for his own good.

There he meets his new best friend Aubrey Plaza (Parks and Recreation), but everything stays more or less the same until Rachel Keller (Fargo) turns up. Keller’s almost as odd as him, not wanting to be touched by anyone, but soon the two are inseparable. Gradually, though, the possibility dawns on Stevens that maybe he’s not mad and that actually he really can move things with his mind and those voices might be other people’s thoughts.

To say the first episode is trippy is to really sell the series short. Every frame and scene seems designed to alienate you and make you wonder if it’s real or the delusion of a schizophrenic. One minute someone will be using an iPad, the next we’ll be in a perfectly designed set from the 1970s where someone’s living inside a tree, the next we’ll discover that person over there we assumed was real is an hallucination, the next we discover that an hallucination was actually perfectly real but a ghost. There are dream sequences and French dance numbers. Time jumps around. 

Sure, there are superpowers but not of the “look how hard I can hit you” kind but “I can enter your memories” and “I can swap bodies with you” kinds designed to make you question reality as it warps and twists. Plaza’s channelling David Bowie, Hawley’s character is named after Roger Barrett from Pink Floyd and to help the geniusly twitchy Stevens understand Haller’s mindset, Hawley gave him a 160-track playlist that included “everything from experimental French sound design to people screaming into bins”.

It’s insane. But in a good way. Right, snuggle buddy?

All of that is quite alienating at first, but there’s also humour in Legion, as well as a pleasingly innocent love affair between Stevens and the possibly imaginary Keller.

Unfortunately, it’s the end of the episode that makes me worry. Because that’s when the superheroes with their “look how hard I can hit you” superpowers turn up. Is the rest of the series going to be like this episode or are we going to be getting more of the hitting?

I really, really hope the former because that would be just amazing. Same time next week at your place? I’ll bring my night vision goggles like last time.

In the US: Mondays, 9/8c, CBS

CBS’s policy of iterating TV shows – taking existing TV shows then making minor changes to them until it perfects their formulae – isn’t without success. After all, Intelligence may have sucked but CBS’s next iteration of it, Limitless, was actually jolly good.

However, I have to question the thinking behind not only commissioning Superior Donuts but airing it just before its antecedent, 2 Broke Girls. Does America really need not just one but two baking goods-based, multi-camera sitcoms featuring a diverse, blue-collar cast as they try to make money in a tough market? On a Monday night?

Yet here we are with Superior Donuts. How curious.

So has this iteration improved on the previous generation? Not hugely, since it lacks Kat Dennings for one thing. But Superior Donuts is at least funnier and less racist, and has more interesting things to say about millennials, the older generation and business than 2 Broke Girls does.

Here, we have old hand Judd Hirsch (Taxi, Numb3rs, Forever, Dear John (USA)) playing Arthur, the gruff owner of a small Chicago doughnut shop having to deal with the fact his neighbourhood is gentrifying and he doesn’t know how to change with the times. Then along comes millennial Jermaine Fowler looking for work. He understands the way of the Twitter and the Instagram and the Yelp, and he also has a few innovations in mind for doughnuts. Soon, a beautiful cross-generational, cross-racial working partnership is born.

With Superior Donuts, CBS has taken a leaf from CBC Canada’s book in order to get to grips with diversity, copying its Kim’s Convenience move by adapting a play, although not one quite as beloved as Kim’s Convenience was. Indeed, some of the dialogue still reeks of both the original play and the theatre itself, with a reference to Jean-Michel Basquiat in the first episode, no less. 

Dotted around the shop is a diverse group. We have two cops (Married with Children‘s Katey Sagal and Third Watch‘s Darien Sills-Evans), a slightly evil Iraqi refugee-turned-real estate developer and dry cleaner (Maz Jobrani), and unemployed factory worker David Koechner (Anchorman). There’s also a blonde rich girl (again, this is airing just before 2 Broke Girls – do they think no one’s going to notice?), played by Anna “daughter of Mikhail” Baryshnikov, who has to endure the eternal rich liberal pain of not being able to experience proper oppression herself.

There is a tragi-comic quality to all the characters, from Sagal’s slight corruption through Jobrani’s memories of growing up in Iraq (“When I was young, they dropped mustard gas on my village and it burned my oesophagus… Now, if I lick a battery, it will kill me.”) to Koechner’s desperation to do any job, whether that’s toileting dogs or donating blood and semen. Jobrani is constantly trying to get Hirsch to sell him the doughnut shop, and with Hirsch a widower and slow to adapt to changing times, it’s a constant possibility.

The show also plays with race. A lot. It just about gets away with it in a way that 2 Broke Girls really doesn’t, since it plays less on stereotypes and more on societal rules. It also helps that Jobrani is the main instigator and foil for the humour – is it okay for Jobrani to call Fowler “the black guy” if he also calls Hirsch “the Jew” and worries that if he gets angry he’ll “sound a bit terroristy”?

All of which makes Superior Donuts seem a lot better than it is. Remember, this is a show that devotes half of its second episode to a quest for the WiFi password in Jobrani’s shop so that Sills-Evans can watch Doctor Who on his phone – sample dialogue: “Do you want to watch Doctor Who? Season 24 is the best.” “No, but after you’ve watched it, I’ll tell you what a vagina looks like.”

Still, it’s a notable improvement on its predecessor, will probably both appeal and educate the pensioners who watch it, and has more heart than the average CBS sitcom for sure. But a show that thinks season 24 of Doctor Who is the best? I’m out.