Jupiter's Legacy

This one is very rough about its pasted-on beard edges. The eight episodes are pretty slow paced for what actually happens: Ageing superhero dad confronts rebellious kids who feel big daddy J's values are old-fashioned and out of date, while in flashback scenes set in the late 1920’s we see how Pops and others originally got their superpowers. Season 1 is all setup and no payoff, introducing a whole mess of conflicts, old vs young, good vs evil, brother vs brother, without really developing them much.

There was one brief flicker of original thought, when the protagonists “The Utopian” (another Superman knockoff a la Omni-Man and Homelander) goes to visit a former supervillain turned shrink for a chat, and the shrink essentially calls bullshit on the premise that our times are now somehow more complicated than they were 90 years ago. Life has always been complicated and filled with compromise, he explains.

(What has changed, from a meta perspective, is we expect greater psychological realism from superhero stories than we did in the past.)

The CG is “Doom being played on a pregnancy test” poor and the fight scenes consequently more silly than satisfying and the hair & beard prosthetics are, hm, distractingly unconvincing. The actress who plays Chloe, the protag’s daughter, is just awful, never looking not miserable in all situations. The flashback scenes by contrast were stylishly done, though as mentioned above the plot development creeps along like one of them newfangled automatic horseless carriage things.

Still, I thought the bones of the story weren’t bad—superhero families behaving, like, you know, families—though maybe a touch overdone in recent years, or hell in recent months, with Invincible and The Boys and whatnot. Given the sluggish and slightly dreary delivery of season one though, I’m not sure we’re ever going to find out what they planned to do with it.