Pilot Review: The Tick

Amazon recently produced a pilot for a rebooted live-action version of the The Tick, and if you're a Prime member, you can watch it for free. Supposedly, they're going to base their decision whether to move forward on the feedback.

Before I offer my thoughts, here's a little background. My introduction to the character came through the brilliant 90's animated series, which is best described as a comedic spin on silver age super-heroics. To me, this will always be the definitive version of the character.

But of course it wasn't the first: The Tick was a comic book before it was a cartoon show. I've read a handful of story lines from that over the years - I like it, even if I find the cynical tone a bit off-putting. The comics feel more like a parody than an homage, and while the writing is funny (extremely funny, to be fair), attempts to simply make fun of the absurdity of the genre rarely work as well as celebrations. There are quite a few reasons for this, but the most notable is that comics readers and writers are perfectly aware of how absurd the premises are, and comics have explored that internally since the beginning. In my opinion, The Tick worked better as a superhero operating in a humorous setting than he did as a joke mocking superheroes.

There was also a short-lived live-action sitcom in 2001 starring Patrick Warburton. I saw about half of the episodes at the time and caught the rest years later on DVD. The show started out a bit mixed, but it improved as it went. I'd have loved to see what they'd have done with a second season: it wasn't a perfect show, but it was certainly fun to see superheroes operating in a sitcom environment.

I think most of us expected Amazon's reboot to follow in its predecessor's footprints - I certainly did. Perhaps I should have stopped and considered the trend, however: the one constant in every new incarnation of The Tick has been a complete overhaul of the tone and direction. The Amazon show reused some jokes from earlier versions, but it was an entirely different creation.

More specifically, this was closer to Netflix's Marvel shows than it is to any version of The Tick that's existed previously. Hell, there might be some Birdman in this thing.

The first indication things weren't going to proceed as expected came from the rating: TV-14 for violence and language. And it's easy to see why - while The Tick's sole fight scene was pretty harmless, the pilot features a rather brutal flashback sequence where a group of heroes are executed. In addition, the world this is set in is gritty and realistic, in spite of the presence of caped heroes and villains.

The episode's (and possibly the series's) main super-villain is colorful and zany, but he comes off more scary than whimsical. If anything, he feels like an extremely accurate version of a generic super-villain from comics: ridiculous in theory, but horrifying up close.

The Tick, however, seems to grasp none of this. Peter Serafinowicz channels Adam West, playing the character as if unable to recognize the world he inhabits isn't Gotham circa 1966. The effect is certainly funny, but it's almost more troubling. It feels as if something is deeply, truly wrong.

Which it almost certainly is. The Tick isn't the main character - that's Arthur, and his backstory has some legitimately tragic elements. The show implies heavily that The Tick may be a manifestation of Arthur's subconscious. Maybe that's a red herring, but questions around the nature of reality and sanity permeate the pilot.

It's certainly an unexpected direction to go in with a character who's always been more slapstick than anything else. But grounded exploration of superhero worlds is something I love, and this has more tolerance for the more colorful aspects of the genre than almost anything I've seen.

My largest complaint is that they based this on The Tick, rather than create new characters. I don't mind the radical reinvention - I just find the retreading of situations a bit tiring (we've seen The Tick wreck Arthur's apartment looking for secret levers a few too many times now). Still, I'll deal with reliving old jokes if that's the price for a weird superheroic dark comedy/psychological drama.

Here's hoping this odd, intriguing series gets picked up.