TV: The Umbrella Academy, season 1 (Netflix, 2019)

This is a dark take on superhero-team stories, especially those with an older father figure running the team as in X-Men or Doom Patrol (even though both of those have already explored the dysfunctional-family aspect of their premise pretty thoroughly), combined with "siblings who have gone very different ways reunite" as in The Royal Tenenbaums. It's also a big fate-of-the-world thriller involving time travel and a secret squad of assassins controlling destiny. That sounds like a very ambitious combination, but in practice The Umbrella Academy is kind of the opposite: it keeps those two threads separate most of the time, and generally avoids following up on side issues or giving us a sense of the larger world that's at stake.( Read more... )