When The Nevers‘the first footage that dropped earlier this year, I clearly remember thinking,’ Ooh, this is steampunk Buffy with corsets! Now that the drama, made by Buffy the Vampire Slayer‘s Joss Whedon, has released his first four episodes to the press, I can confirm: it’s indeed steampunk Buffy with corsets – and for various reasons it is no longer an attractive concept.
For sure, The Nevers is from a piece with Whedon’s kickass-girl-power oeuvre, which includes Buffy and Dollhouse, as well as elements in Angel, Firefly and Agents of SHIELD The period drama, which premieres on Sunday (HBO, 9 / 8c), focuses on a (mostly female) group of 19th-century Londoners who were mysteriously ‘touched’ by a force that gave them different powers.
These abilities – or ‘turn’, in the spoken language of the program, range from the strange specific (one character can turn objects into glass with her breath) to almost superhero (another can create fireballs with a swirl of her palms) . Since society does not understand the affected, it fears and insults them. While the series was starting, many people were touched in an orphanage run by Mrs. Amalia True is managed (played by Foreignersee Laura Donnelly).
At one point, True calls the orphanage’s meeting a ‘fur covenant’, and that’s appropriate. The description should also be incredibly familiar to anyone who watched Buffy‘s last season, when the show’s main heroine found her the de facto Miss Hannigan for a house full of young women who might one day follow in her footsteps. If you will allow me a short shorthand for my partner Buffy fans: We’re actually watching the Potentials storyline that plays out from the front, except this time, we know more about the girls’ names. And of course, an ominous and mysterious force tries to bring out the touched for good.
But even if you do not have a Buffy buff, here are enough right-handers to give viewers of Whedon’s other series déjà vu. The heroine continues grimly, despite the darkness brooding in her? The brainmate who has a talent for conjuring things that help the heroine do her job? The sloppy villain who haunts free verse amid the bloody violence? The snippets of visions that give the good guys a knife-thin edge? A glowing sphere of unknown origin? Yep, everyone there. Sometimes it feels like all that’s missing is a bleached blonde bad boy haunting his newly learned, exuberant soul.
To be clear: None of the above makes The Nevers a bad show, just a very surprising one. What sours the experience for me is the Whedon -ness of it all, in light of recent allegations about his behavior behind the scenes over the years. How can the audience that strives for female characters be created by someone who, according to the former female employees, was ‘toxic’, ‘hostile’ and ‘unfit’ during his performances? (In November, Whedon announced that he had left The NeversHe calls the series a “joyful experience”, but says he is “truly exhausted” and “stepping back to fight my energy to my own life, which is also on the verge of exciting change.” Whedon remains an executive producer on the program; Philippa Goslett took over as showrunner.)
The bright lights in this dark situation are Donelly and her regular playwright Ann Skelly (Vikings), who plays the perky Miss Penance Adair. Skelly brings Adair, an innovative thinker who can sense electricity and serves as True’s right – handed wife, a lovely warmth and peculiar depth. And Donnelly is incredibly watchable as True, who bends down with wry humor, simmering with anger – but by the end of Episode 4 we still do not know exactly what, and regret that a good general means we are not too close to your soldiers . The cast also includes Ben Chaplin (The truth about cats and dogs) as stubborn police inspector Frank Mundi, Denis O’Hare (American horror story) as depraved dr. Edmund Den Haag and Pip Torrens (The crown) as the strong anti-touched Lord Gilbert Massen.
Perhaps the show’s premium cable bed will eventually make the show flourish in a different way than that of Whedon’s other series, all of which were broadcast in broadcast networks. Unfortunately, the most striking indicator so far is The Nevers‘more permissible network standards are the distribution of boobs for the sake of boobs, courtesy of a side-plot over an illegal settlement of lords. Know what makes it even harder to see this show through a feminist lens? As naked women at a sex club present only for men’s pleasure, strolling across the screen … apparently only for men’s pleasure.
THE TV LINE UNDERLINE: With a Buffy-be-there, done-that feeling, The Nevers is a repetition of famous tropics of a now controversial creator.