Friday, March 1, 2019

As It Turns Out, DC's Titans Is Pretty Good



I was not rooting for this show. DC's Titans is the kind of ill-conceived premise that you'd think would leave a show dead-on-arrival. The marketing for this thing promised a surreal, overly gritty and superficially mature show with all the trappings that come with it.

Except DC's Titans is actually kind of good?

Trust me, I was the last person to expect something like that to happen. I saw the trailers, the same as you did and when Robin dropped the f-bomb and put some disrespect on Batman's name I was ready to hate-watch this thing as it turned into a glorious edgelord nightmare.

Turns out that I got a pretty great version of the Doom Patrol in the sneakiest backdoor pilot I've seen in a while, along with some pretty cathartic confrontations between Dick Grayson and Jason Todd. Hawk and Dove also turned out to be characters I unironically love and oh, man Wonder Girl? Even Wonder Girl was lovable. And I thought I was going to hate Starfire but Anna Diop was kind of acting circles around the rest of the cast and doing it while wearing actual fashion crimes.



It's not all good.

The effects can look cheap, poor Anna Diop's costuming suffers, the show dips into some adorable levels of edginess, Raven's character is kind of incoherent and there are as many gorgeous shots as there are moments of colour palette drab.

But that's as much as I can say. As it turns out, DC's Titans might not be the most faithful to the source material and it sure doesn't have a lot of respect for convention but maybe that's the best part about it. In a lot of ways, it is the superficially mature show that the marketing promised but in a lot of others, it's a clever new spin on a gritty group of characters dealing with a violent world while wearing superhero masks. For all its faults, DC's Titans is actually one of the better versions of the Teen Titans. It's not gonna compete with your nostalgia for the 2003 show but you'd be surprised how well the Teen Titans work when filtered through the lens of Watchmen.

Hard recommend. It might not be for everyone but you'll probably be surprised at how much this is probably for you.

0 comments:

Post a Comment