Tuesday, August 7, 2018

Too Much TV: CLOAK AND DAGGER (2018 - ?)

The catastrophic failure of The Inhumans was the effective end of Marvel Studios' relationship with the ABC broadcast network. As Agents of SHIELD limps to its conclusion next year, Marvel seeks new small-screen fields to conquer, placing Runaways on Hulu and Cloak and Dagger on Freeform, the former ABC Family Channel and long-longago Christian Broadcasting Network.   Freeform targets a young adult audience and Cloak and Dagger fits that demographic quite snugly. Showrunner Joe Pokaski pretty much recreates the characters from scratch, their origin little resembling the 1980s comics written by credited creator Bill Mantlo.  Pokaski's work on Heroes has more immediate influence on the story and the tone of the show as the young protagonists struggle to figure out exactly what they've become, not to mention why.

Ty Johnson (Aubrey Joseph) is a private-school basketball player still haunted by the officer-involved death of his older brother on the docks of New Orleans. Tandy Bowen (Olivia Holt) is a drug-addict dropout grifter still haunted by the death of her father, a scientist for the Roxxon corporation, during a major New Orleans storm. These tragedies are simultaneous, and the kids first meet when Ty, trying to recover his brother's body, ends up rescuing Tandy from her father's submerged car. Something else happened that night that only becomes apparent when  the kids become teens and meet again. Ty can teleport, often involuntarily, and can project an extra-dimensional darkness that can consume people. Tandy can make daggers of pure light appear in her hands for stabbing or throwing. She can also access people's innermost hopes and ideals when she touches them, while Ty can access their deepest fears and darkest memories. When the kids touch, their powers can complement each other or they can blast each other in opposite directions. Initially suspicious of each other, they find themselves inexorably drawn together to solve the mysteries behind their loved ones' deaths and the industrial accident that, by one account, has made them the latest in a long line of tragic saviors of New Orleans.

As a teen-hero show Cloak and Dagger is much better than Fox's The Gifted, which is too enamored and yet too aloof from X-mythology for its own good. The early confusion of the young heroes is a welcome change from the glib knowingness of most superhero TV as Ty and Tandy try to figure things out with nothing like the typical hero support network. The young actors (both are 20) convincingly portray Ty's earnest anxiety and Tandy's naive cynicism. The writers do a decent job of slow-motion world building in their isolated corner of the Marvel universe, though they sometimes overdo the folkloric angle. The scenes with Ty's girlfriend Evita (Noelle Renee Bercy) and her voodoo-priestess aunt (Angela Davis) are heavyhandedly on the nose in a way that most of the show is not, while one whole episode practically beats us over the head with "hero's journey" archetyping as Evita attends a class on Joseph Campbell. All too many hero writers have been influenced by Campbell and Campbell-influenced English classes, but none have ever acknowledged it so brazenly. The archetypal stuff feels superfluous when the show has more interesting and obvious areas to explore, from the murderous doings of Roxxon to the the apparently systemic corruption of the New Orleans police department which chews up and spits out any officer that might grow friendly toward our heroes.  As far as super powers go, for the most part the show presents them in interesting ways that emphasize how disorienting they are to their users. It's only with the first season finale that we seem to reach a creative or budgetary limit as the kids have an uninspired running battle with rage-virus victims and combine their powers in some murky way to save the city. Cloak and Dagger will be better off not reaching beyond its grasp next season, nor repeating Heroes' fatal sophomore jinx. This show is at its best when it looks at ominous conspiracies from the limited but awakening perspective of youth. It should not try to grow up too fast.

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