Television Review: Titans (Season 1, 2018)

Marvel Comics can certainly take pride in its cinematic universe, which, despite featuring far less well-known comic book heroes, has without any trouble established total dominance over the film universe of rival publisher DC Comics. On the small screen, however, the story is quite different, given that DC Comics generally fares better than Marvel, whose attempt to create a television universe on Netflix ended in ignominious failure. DC’s superheroes, on the other hand, are far better integrated into their own universe, which began in 2012 with the TV series Arrow, and a new one was being built, whose first cornerstone is the TV series Titans, which premiered in the autumn of 2018.

The creators of the new series are fairly well-known – Oscar-winning film screenwriter Akiva Goldsman, comic book author Geoff Johns, and television producer Greg Berlanti, known for a string of successful series in earlier years. As its basic premise, they decided to use the so-called Teen Titans, a DC Comics superhero team that could most easily be described as a kind of junior league compared to Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman and the rest of the gang. Among them, the most recognisable to the wider public will be Dick Grayson (Brenton Thwaites) alias Robin, a former circus performer whom Bruce Wayne alias Batman adopted and trained after the death of his parents to help him as a masked vigilante in the fight against crime in Gotham City. At the start of the series, however, Grayson does this job in a much more conventional way, namely as a regular detective in the Detroit police force, and is determined to leave his career as a masked avenger behind him, convinced that it, much like his mentor, has made him too violent.

Through a twist of fate, he will become entangled in the case of Rachel Roth (Teagan Croft), an adolescent girl endowed with supernatural and potentially destructive powers, whom an organisation with dark goals is trying to find. She, in turn, will gain Garfield “Gar” Logan (Ryan Potter) as a helper, a teenager capable of transforming into a tiger, while Kory (Anna Diop), a dark-skinned woman suffering from amnesia who often finds herself in awkward situations where she must use her destructive pyrokinesis abilities, joins the search for her.

Like Netflix's series dedicated to superheroes, Titans uses a season format closer to a so-called limited series, so the first season concludes after 11 episodes. This, on one hand, allows for a somewhat smaller budget, a bit more flexibility regarding content and narrative direction, but it also better hides shortcomings that would have begun to grate on viewers far sooner in a traditional season of 20+ episodes. Not that there aren't any here, as anyone familiar with the work of Akiva Goldsman, one of probably the most overrated Hollywood screenwriters, could have assumed beforehand.

The fundamental problem with Titans is, above all, of a conceptual nature. The Teen Titans superhero team in the original comic book was conceived as a kind of softened, adolescent version of superheroes whose life stories, characters, and general tone were supposed to be at least a few shades brighter compared to their adult equivalents. The television version, however, goes in the completely opposite direction – the general tone is far darker compared to Nolan's Batman or Snyder's Superman, something reflected not only through literally dark cinematography (because of which viewers will at times have trouble understanding what is happening), but also darker and more depressive content. This also relates to the "maturity" of the Titans compared to traditional superheroes, for which perhaps the clearest example is the decision to use coarse language, which was even used in promoting the series.

Far more striking, however, will be the explicitness of the violence, namely the various and graphically depicted ways in which people in this show are beaten to death, stabbed, burned alive, or become victims of wild beasts. Because of this, after this season, it is hard to perceive Titans as some kind of "relaxed" series for younger fans of DC Comics or superhero comics.

The very tone of the series might not have stood out so much, or represented a nuisance, had the characters and their subplots been well conceived. In all of this, one can recognise a considerable inconsistency in quality when it comes to individual episodes. The best episodes are those featuring the superhero and romantic couple Hank Hall alias Hawk (Alan Ritchson) and Dawn Granger alias Dove (Minka Kelly) as supporting characters, or the episode where a tiny breath of fresh air is brought by the guest appearance of the future protagonists of the spin-off series Doom Patrol. But such moments are too few, and the nominal protagonists are as bland as Robin or as irritating as Gar, and the story, despite its relative brevity, unravels too slowly.

The creators of the series seem to have been aware of this, deciding to spice up the final episode by flirting with alternate universes, but here too the series is made incredibly dark, culminating in an "unexpected" twist followed by an even more irritating cliffhanger. Titans might have been interesting perhaps a decade earlier, but fans of superhero content on the big and small screen today have far more numerous and higher-quality alternatives at their disposal.

RATING: 4/10 (+)

(Note: The text in the original Croatian version was posted here.)

Blog in Croatian https://draxblog.com
Blog in English https://draxreview.wordpress.com/
InLeo blog https://inleo.io/@drax.leo

LeoDex: https://leodex.io/?ref=drax
Hiveonboard: https://hiveonboard.com?ref=drax
InLeo: https://inleo.io/signup?referral=drax.leo
Rising Star game: https://www.risingstargame.com?referrer=drax
1Inch: https://1inch.exchange/#/r/0x83823d8CCB74F828148258BB4457642124b1328e

BTC donations: 1EWxiMiP6iiG9rger3NuUSd6HByaxQWafG
ETH donations: 0xB305F144323b99e6f8b1d66f5D7DE78B498C32A7
BCH donations: qpvxw0jax79lhmvlgcldkzpqanf03r9cjv8y6gtmk9