The Hero Cable Has Been Waiting For

FX’s new drama, Legion, is Marvel gone Cable

Televised comic book content has reached critical mass. In theory, that would lead to the telling of many interesting stories. In execution, they all look the same.

Introducing new superheroes to the general public follows a very specific formula regardless of the medium — television, cinema, or otherwise. It looks like this:

• An extraordinary thing happens to a person.
• The person gains powers.
• The person struggles with responsibilities associated with their powers.
• The person realizes they are not alone.
• Slap a cape on it and send it out the door.

I get it, I like it, and I’m tired of it.

It’s been about 20 years since comic books went mainstream. Now that TV is as good as it has ever been, 2017 is the perfect time to mess with the comic book adaptation formula.

Testing the TV hypothesis on FX’s new series, Legion, is Noah Hawley — the show runner behind Fargo. Similar to FX’s cold weather critical darling, Legion is not a direct adaptation of existing material. Rather, it is an exploration of what other stories live in an established world — in this case, one where mutants exist and battle robots, brotherhoods of evil mutants, and the occasional deity.

In speaking about Legion at the New York Comic-Con, Noah Hawley talked about the place his title character holds in an established universe.

“The great thing about exploring this character is before he has an opinion about anyone else, he has to figure out his own shit. That’s what we all have to do. This journey isn’t necessarily racing toward a battle with an entity, so much as embracing the battle within.”

No Ultron, no Magneto, no X-Men, no Apocalypse. Sign me up.

Comic book stories take place in a society that accepts the existence of superheroes. What has kept the X-Men interesting since their debut in the 1960’s is that no matter how many times they save the world, societal acceptance never comes. The X-Men operate in a world where mutants are despised. A TV show set in that world allows for exploration of what being a mutant — but not a superhero — actually means.

David Heller, is the son of Earth’s most important mutant, Charles Xavier aka Professor X. Heller — a diagnosed schizophrenic — has been confined to psychiatric facilities his entire life. He isn’t on his way to being part of the X-Men; he isn’t even on his way to being part of society.

The lack of traditional superhero TV show beats allows for interesting questions that the series can explore:

• What does a comic book adaptation look like when there is no traditional superhero?
• How unreliable of a narrator is David Heller (Legion), being that he has schizophrenia?
• Is the world he experiencing all in his mind, or is it really happening?

While the X-Men film series has focused on telling mutant stories in a human world, Legion is telling a very human story in a mutant world. The prevailing theme throughout fifty years of X-Men comics has been that mutants have to stick up for each other because the world at large hates them. They have to save one another for mutant kind to survive.

Except in this one case.

Legion is about an outcast that has been outcast by the outcasts.

Mutant abilities or not, that is a premise of a show worth watching.