The Nevers should be a triumphant TV homecoming for Joss Whedon. This is the first series in more than a decade created solely by the man responsible for it Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, en Firefly. (He co-created Agents of SHIELD back in 2013 with brother Jed Whedon and sister-in-law Maurissa Tancharoen, and was not really involved in the pilot episode.) This is his first dance with premium cable, after working the early stages of his career for low-budget broadcasting networks or a minimal confidence in his ideas. After spending much of the last ten years directing comics, it’s a return to the medium that made him a creative superstar, with a premise – a multitude of superhuman women is stirring up Victorian England – and listen back to the famous Buffy themes of female empowerment in a world run by bad men.
But what in theory is a neat and clean comeback story is in fact a big mess. In recent months, Whedon has been approached by colleagues from Justice League actor Ray Fisher on Angel‘s Charisma Carpenter (who said, among other things, that Whedon turned her on after she became pregnant) and Buffysays Michelle Trachtenberg (who was a teenager during their collaboration, and said a rule should be introduced that Whedon may not be alone in her room). Whedon has in fact already left The Nevers before the allegations of Carpenter and others Buffy alums have emerged, and the entire post-production process is under the supervision of Philippa Goslett, deputy. Whedon may have once been a big selling point for a fantasy series like this, where he’s significantly more known than anyone in the cast, but instead he’s not part of the marketing at all. A recent HBO press release on the program contains nearly 600 words and the mention of 19 other stakeholders before Whedon’s name appears, and only in the context of the premiere writing and directing. (He also directed two more from the initial series of six sections.)
But even though Whedon still had the pristine cult icon image of the turn of the century, The Nevers would still be a disappointment. It contains many of the elements you would expect from a Whedon show, and on a larger scale than any of the older ones, but some pieces only occasionally come into focus. Others make you wonder why they are there at all. This is not uncommon for Whedon, as the scientist Western Firefly is the only one of its previous series that has been fully formed while he needed half a season or more to figure out exactly how to tell the stories ofBuffy ,Angel , enDollhouse
. But with his sudden – and, subsequently understandable – exit, it will be Goslett’s job to look through this kaleidoscope of ideas and see if anything beautiful falls into place. And ironically, Fox got started
Fireflyout of order, with the two-hour local plane being broadcast only at the end; so it played another Whedon show that for a while did not know what it was doing. We opened in London in the late 1890s. A mysterious incident has caused a growing number of people – mostly, but not entirely women – to be transformed in an unusual way. These are pre-comic books (and very early in the age of the masses), and so these people are referred to as “Touched”, and their powers as “twisted”. Many of those affected gathered in an orphanage run by disabled social worker Lavinia Bidlow (
Dollhouse alum Olivia Williams). Some of their turns are self-evident: the young Primrose (Anna Devlin) is 10 feet tall, while the orphanage doctor, Horatio Cousens (Zackary Momoh) has comfortable healing powers. Other twists are a little more complicated, especially for our two main heroines. Penance Adair (Ann Skelly) can see electricity, which somehow enables her to invent all sorts of steampunk articles, while the widow Amalia True (Laura Donnelly) occasionally gets a glimpse of the future, what has the side effect of … making her a ninja? There are nasty potential explanations for this, such as that she can see the opponents of the opponents before they make it, but her powers do not seem to work differently, and the presentation is confusing, here and elsewhere. It mainly feels like Whedon wants a Buffy or Black Widow type in the middle of the action, and has not weakened the details.There is a lot of that indifference throughout The Nevers. Or maybe it’s just that a lot is happening
The Nevers , and it’s hard to keep track of everything. In addition to Amalia and Penance playing 19th-century X-Men and trying harder to find and protect the Touched, a serial killer named Maladie (Amy Manson) terrorizes polite London society; government official Lord Massen (Pip Torrens) is planning an official campaign against Touched; crazy scientist Edmund Hague (Denis O’Hare) goes to horrific extremes to understand exactly how these ‘twists’ work; bored aristocrat Hugo Swann (James Norton) starts a specialized brothel to take advantage of the upper class’s charm with the touched; and crooked policeman Frank Mundi (Ben Chaplin) is trapped in the middle of it all. These are more records in the air than Whedon and his collaborators (several episodes were written by Buffy veterinarian Jane Espenson) can turn comfortably. Some sub-sites, such as those about Swann’s illegal new business, seem to exist only to explain that Whedon no longer works for Fox or the World Cup. Other characters feel recovered from his previous work – Manson plays Maladie with the same breath, little girl voice as Juliet Landau once as the vampire Drusilla Buffy– and different alliances and power sets make little sense, no matter how much they are declared over and over again. And where the merging of space opera and southern tropical reconstruction was mostly seamless
Firefly , world construction is more mocking here. Sometimes it feels more or less like the real Victorian London, only with the occasional super fight, while other scenes point to a much more fundamentally changed place in the three years since Touched first gained their powers. One episode culminates in violence on a scale that would completely improve city life for some time, but it is treated as an event that only concerns the affected and the people who are bent on it. Some aspects of
The Nevers feel that you have fully realized to compensate for these mistakes and many others. The action scenes are mostly exciting, especially a fight in the third episode (directed by David Semel) with a killer who can walk on water and a potential victim trying to swim away from him. If Mrs. True’s skills seem sketchy, and the archetype of the character now too familiar with Whedon’s work, Laura Donnelly also treads confidently in boots previously filled by Sarah Michelle Gellar, Eliza Dushku, Amy Acker, Summer Glau, Scarlett Johansson, and … well, you get the idea. And Lord Massen’s utter contempt for the affected – not just mainly female and underclass, but with a reasonable percentage of non-white members – plays out well as a metaphor for how hard-to-establish societal hierarchies will push back against any change.
Overall, the digital effects on the show are impressive, with the exception that Primrose is becoming a giant girl. It seems like an attempt to work with a more retro, forced perspective approach (such as seeing Gandalf hang out with Frodo in Fellowship of the Ring ), but it looks completely out of style with slick instances where one of Penance’s gadgets illuminates the night sky, or when Maladie’s sidekick Bonfire Annie (Rochelle Neil) throws a ball flame at an opponent. Even some of the parts that click largely feel tainted by the accusations against Whedon.
Buffy would be far from the first, or last, important work of art created by a bad person. In this case, it’s not just that so many of the allegations against Whedon are recent, but that so many of them face his persona as a proponent of progressive, feminist ideals. When Amalia True and Lord Massen verbally swear or rich, white men should be the referees on how society works, we are meant to attract her, but suddenly he sounds too convincing. When we see a male department store manager trying to force a fearful female employee to sleep with him, it’s hard not to think of Whedon’s ex-wife Kai Cole confessing to doing business with many of his female subordinates in the country. had not. Buffy
days. A lot of it sounds in a way that neither Whedon nor his successor wants, and other parts – like a running gag about Myrtle (Viola Prettejohn), a white English girl who turns out to be constantly speaking in foreign languages , so that others are surprised when Japanese or Chinese escape her mouth – will be even slightly tone deaf even in better conditions. Whedon leaves after the main photography is completed in London, and much can happen in the post-production process to change the original filming. But whatever Goslett and the editing team did,
The Nevers still feels like a Joss Whedon show, for better or worse, with most of the downside due to his work, and only the occasional glimpse of what made him beloved before he poisoned has become. The Nevers premieres April 11 on HBO. I saw the first four of six episodes.