‘The Nevers’: fantasy series has no magic to erase Joss Whedon

The Nevers it must be a triumphant homecoming on TV for Joss Whedon. It is the first series in more than a decade created exclusively by the man responsible for Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, and Firefly. (He co-created SHIELD agents in 2013, with brother Jed Whedon and sister-in-law Maurissa Tancharoen, and was not really involved after the pilot episode.) It is his first dance with premium cable TV, after spending the previous phase of his career working for broadcast networks with or low budgets or minimal faith in your ideas. After spending much of the past 10 years directing comic book films, it is a return to the medium that has made him a creative superstar, with one premise – a series of superhuman women causing a stir in Victorian England – going back to what was familiar Buffy themes of female empowerment in a world ruled by bad men.

But what in theory is a clean and neat return narrative is, in reality, a big mess. In recent months, Whedon has been accused of abusive behavior throughout his career by colleagues from Justice League actor Ray Fisher for AngelCharisma Carpenter (who said, among other things, that Whedon turned on her after she got pregnant) and Buffyit is Michelle Trachtenberg (who was a teenager at the time they worked together and said that a rule had to be instituted so that Whedon could not be alone in a room with her). Whedon, in fact, has already left The Nevers before the claims of Carpenter and others Buffy alumni emerged, leaving the entire post-production process to be overseen by substitute showrunner Philippa Goslett. Whedon may have been a big selling point for a fantasy series like this, where he is significantly more famous than anyone else in the cast, but instead he is not part of marketing at all. A recent HBO press release about the show contains almost 600 words, and the mention of 19 other people involved, before Whedon’s name appears, and only in the context of having written and directed the premiere. (He also directed two more of the initial batch of six episodes.)

But even if Whedon still had the immaculate image of the turn of the century cult icon, The Nevers it would still be a disappointment. It has 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 leave you wondering why they are around. This is not uncommon for Whedon, as the sci-fi western Firefly is the only one from its previous series to arrive fully formed while he needed half a season or more to figure out exactly how to tell the stories ofBuffy ,Angel , andDoll house

. But with his abrupt departure – and, in retrospect, understandable -, it will be Goslett’s job to peer through that kaleidoscope of ideas and see if something beautiful fits. And, ironically, Fox ended up running

Fireflyout of service, with the two-hour site pilot not airing until the end; so it played like another Whedon show that didn’t know what it was doing for a while. We opened in London in the late 1890s. A mysterious incident left an increasing number of people – mainly, but not entirely, women – transformed in an unusual way. This is before comics (and at the very beginning of the pulp era), so these people are simply called “touched” and their powers “spins”. Many of the Touched gathered in an orphanage run by the disabled socialite Lavinia Bidlow (

Doll house alum Olivia Williams). Some of his turns are self-explanatory: the young Primrose (Anna Devlin) is 3 meters tall, while the orphanage doctor, Horatio Cousens (Zackary Momoh), conveniently has healing powers. Other curves are a little more complicated, especially for our two main heroines. Penance Adair (Ann Skelly) can see electricity, which somehow allows her to invent all kinds of steampunk devices, while widow Amalia True (Laura Donnelly) occasionally catches a glimpse of the future, which has the side effect of … make her a ninja? There are potential nerdy explanations for this, like her being able to see her opponents’ movements before they do, but that doesn’t seem to be how her powers work, and the presentation is confusing, here and elsewhere. It seems that Whedon wanted a Buffy or Black Widow type at the center of the action, and was not concerned with the details.There is much of this oversight over The Nevers. Or maybe it’s just that just too much is happening

The Nevers , and it’s difficult to control everything. In addition to Amalia and Penance playing 19th-century X-Men and trying to find and protect more of the Tocados, a serial killer named Maladie (Amy Manson) is terrorizing educated London society; the government official, Lord Massen (Pip Torrens), is plotting an official campaign against the Tocados; the crazy scientist Edmund Hague (Denis O’Hare) goes to terrible extremes to understand how exactly these “loops” work; the bored aristocrat Hugo Swann (James Norton) is opening a specialized brothel to take advantage of the upper class’s fascination with the Tocados; and corrupt police officer Frank Mundi (Ben Chaplin) is caught in the middle of it all. There are more signs in the air than Whedon and his collaborators (several episodes were written by Buffy Jane Espenson) can rotate comfortably. Some subplots, like the one about Swann’s new illicit business, seem to exist only to clarify that Whedon is no longer working for Fox or the WB. Other characters feel recycled from their previous work – Manson plays Maladie in the same breathless girlish voice that Juliet Landau once used as the vampire Drusilla in Buffy– and various alliances and power sets make little sense, no matter how repeatedly they are explained. And where the mix of space opera and Southern Reconstruction tropes was almost perfect in

Firefly , the construction of the world is more tainted here. At times, it looks more or less like the real Victorian London, with only an occasional super fight, while other scenes suggest a much more fundamentally altered place in the three years since the Tocados first gained their powers. An episode culminates in an act of violence on a scale that would completely change life in the city for some time, but is treated as an event that relates only to the Tocados and the people who are out of shape for them. Some aspects of

The Nevers feel fully realized enough to make up for these mistakes and many others. The action scenes are mostly exciting, particularly a fight in the third episode (directed by David Semel) involving an assassin who can walk on water and a potential victim trying to swim away from him. If Mrs. True’s skills seem superficial, and the character archetype now overly familiar from Whedon’s work, Laura Donnelly also confidently walks 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 absolute contempt for the Tocados – not only mainly women and lower classes, but with a good percentage of non-white members – works well as a metaphor for how hard-established social hierarchies will resist any and all changes.

In general, the digital effects in the program are impressive, with the exception of turning Primrose into a giant girl. It seems like an attempt to go with a more retro approach, from a forced perspective (a bit like watching Gandalf go out Brotherhood of the Ring ), but it seems totally out of style with smarter examples where one of Penance’s devices lights up the night sky or when Maladie’s Bonfire helper Annie (Rochelle Neil) hurls a fireball at an opponent. Still, even some of the most clickable parties appear to be contaminated by the charges against Whedon.

Buffy it would be far from being the first or the last important work of art to be created by a bad person. In this case, it is not only the fact that many of the charges against Whedon are recent, but also that many of them go against his persona as an advocate of progressive feminist ideals. When Amalia True and Lord Massen verbally discuss whether wealthy white men should be the arbiter of how society works, we should side with her, but he suddenly seems very persuasive. When we see a department store manager trying to coerce a terrified employee into sleeping with him, it’s hard not to think about Whedon’s ex-wife, Kai Cole, claiming that he confessed to having affairs with many of his subordinates in the Buffy

days. Much of this sounds empty in a way that neither Whedon nor his successor seems to want, and elsewhere – like a joke about Myrtle (Viola Prettejohn), a white English girl whose turn makes her speak in foreign languages ​​perpetually, so that others are perplexed when Japanese or Chinese escape from your mouth – they would sound slightly deaf, even in better circumstances. Whedon left after the main photography ended in London, and a lot can happen in the post-production process to change what was initially filmed. But whatever Goslett and the editing team did,