![]() ![]() In The Umbrella Academy, we open on a young girl at a public swimming pool in Soviet Russia, who goes from flirting with a boy at the pool to transition labor in three seconds (and manages to deliver a full-term baby without removing her one-piece bathing suit). In Rushdie’s novel, this premise is allegorical the children are born in the hour of India’s newborn independence (Partition, meet Parturition!), and the shadowy peril is Indira Gandhi. Intrigued? All these babies will turn out to have unique supernatural abilities, and they will be the subject of lifelong, ominous interest from an abusive authority figure. The pilot sets up the Rushdie-esque high concept right at the beginning: Forty-three babies are born simultaneously to women who hadn’t even been pregnant when they’d woken up that morning. ![]() Have you ever had a flaky friend who spent so much time concocting flamboyant exotic excuses for missing drinks (or your wedding, or the deadline for the rent money) that you’re exhausted just listening to them spin, and feel the overwhelming urge to point out that just doing what they said they’d do would have taken a tenth of the energy? The Umbrella Academy is that friend. The Umbrella Academy does handsprings to keep you watching, and yet never realizes that all it has to do is exhibit a modicum of non-superpowered follow-through. But it took maybe eight minutes before I was asking myself if this was one of those insiders-only crypto-adaptations that would only make sense to someone who’d read the comics repeatedly and obsessively. Superpowered school influence series#And if Rushdie fathered the premise, the stylebook seems to have been sired by Daniel Handler touches reminiscent of A Series of Unfortunate Events abound in its dour-meets-steampunk aesthetic. Blige and Cameron Britton as a pair of bureaucracy-dogged time-jumping assassins are entirely giggle-worthy. The bizarre, mannered performances by Mary J. Even hairy gorilla arms can’t prevent Tom Hopper from being adorable. You know what, The Umbrella Academy is not bad. Superpowered school influence tv#So in the first minutes of the pilot I went all squiggly and said to myself, “Salman Rushdie and a solo violin playing a schmaltzy earworm from The Phantom of the Opera? Sign me up!” Superhero TV was poised for some next-level stuff, creating a universe rife with 1980s pop culture phenomena and cashing in every dividend from a solid-gold allegory. It’s a riff on Salman Rushdie’s brain-bending magical realist masterpiece, Midnight’s Children. But the premise for Gerard Way’s comic wasn’t derived from Stan Lee. I’ve seen a few people comparing Netflix’s The Umbrella Academy to X-Men, and the Academy in question does have superficial similarities to Casa de Charles Xavier. All of them have some kind of superpower, and there’s a shadowy, abusive, powerful figure who wants to round them up for reasons that aren’t entirely clear. ![]() Simpson: American Crime Story.A diverse bunch of seemingly unconnected children are born simultaneously. "What's funny is in the writer's room, the entire time we wrote on the show, we never once referenced Ally McBeal," says series creator and head writer Jessica Gao, who instead cites Fleabag, Better Call Saul and even The People v. "Marvel's Ally McBeal" isn't exactly the company line, though. "And so it was always about finding that balance between making a half-hour comedy, which is a new genre for the MCU, and still feeling like we fit into the universe that has been created." " Ally McBeal was absolutely a reference for this show," Coiro tells Yahoo Entertainment during interviews following Marvel's eventful San Diego Comic-Con presentation on Saturday. ![]() That's no accident, according to director Kat Coiro. Scenes from the series' first trailer may recall another legal comedy, the late-'90s Calista Flockhart-starring Ally McBeal. She-Hulk: Attorney at Law stars Tatiana Maslany ( Orphan Black) as Jennifer Walters, a lawyer specializing in superhuman cases and cousin of Mark Ruffalo's Bruce Banner, who also finds herself going green after she's accidentally cross-contaminated with his blood. WandaVision may have regularly spoofed classic American sitcoms, but Marvel is billing its next and eighth Disney+ series as its first actual half-hour comedy. ![]()
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