Two episodes in, I enjoy the casting a lot but nothing else about the show excites me much yet.
It’s a weird mix on the production side. It doesn’t seem low-budget. There’s a pretty solid looking digital monkey character, good use of other more subtle effects, sets look nice, etc. They also clearly budgeted for music licensing, but that’s where things start to go wrong for me.
My Chemical Romance always had a sort of Hot Topic goth-y aesthetic I approached assuming I would hate but actually really dug. I don’t know how to articulate it other than to say they had a flair and style that worked for me, and as lead singer Gerard Way wrote the Umbrella Academy comic (co-creating it with artist Gabriel Ba), something of his artistic sensibilities came through and resonated with me there too.
None of that flair makes it to the screen in the TV show. The notable musical numbers so far are a Tiffany song, and distractingly edited* versions of Istanbul by TMBG and Don’t Stop Me by Queen. All fine (even great) songs, but none of the scenes feel like they’re doing anything other than ticking a checkbox on some design doc Way created but had no control over in production. “Include cool music” was the directive, and it was handed off to someone with dull taste and no sense of when and why they should pick the songs they picked.
I’m coming down pretty hard on those couple of musical choices and it’s only two episodes in, so I should probably reserve judgement. I’m still glad to see any adaption at all off this weird little niche comic that was popular a decade ago. But right now I’m just projecting the magic of the comic onto the safely executed but uninspired production of the show.
*the cutting up of the songs really bugs me, but that’s pretty common. So I know I shouldn’t hold that against the show too aggressively, but it just drives me nuts when a TV or movie scene goes to a song I know and then starts making jumps to the chorus too soon or skips verses or whatever. If you want to see this done right, watch this scene from season one of Legion (no revelatory spoilers, if you’re not familiar with the show you won’t even have the context to understand what’s going on well enough to have much spoiled should you watch it later on). If you want to see it done wrong, watch pretty much any other show.