In my review of the Zack Snyder Cut of Justice League, in the wake of near-universal hatred for the Joss Whedon-directed theatrical release, I’d said that at least the Snyder Cut would give a chance to determine whether Joss’ version was making the best of bad material or butchering something that otherwise would have worked. (My verdict was ambiguous: the first movie was a dull grey slog, and the Snyder version is twice as much dull grey slog with somewhat more character development.)
But even before demand built up for the Snyder Cut, Whedon was working on a new project for HBO, The Nevers, and ended up leaving that for reasons unexplained but probably related to the avalanche of hits to his backstage reputation in Hollywood. So with the series premiering on April 11, we have a similar question as to whether the remaining production team (including Buffy veterans Jane Espenson and Douglas Petrie) have a good idea that they screwed up or a bad idea that they can only do so much to redeem. However the pilot episode was both written and directed by Whedon himself, so it should convey the intended approach.
One valid critique of Whedon is that he tends to go for the same themes a lot. In Buffy the Vampire Slayer, there was only one Slayer per generation, who was always a young girl, but each Slayer was monitored and trained by a mostly male, entirely British order of Watchers. Well, in The Nevers, almost the entire cast is British cause it’s set in London, 1899, where a few thousand people, mostly women, were “touched” by what appears to be fairy dust sprinkled by a passing alien lifeform and/or spaceship. As a result they were altered, some more obviously than others, with what are called “turns.” The main character seems to be the widowed Amalia True (Laura Donnelly), whose main power seems to be psychic visions (or as she calls them, ‘rippling’), but this being a Whedon hero, she also kicks serious ass, and this being the Victorian period, she kicks even more ass when she’s wielding an umbrella. Her much less prim best friend Patience Adair (Ann Skelly) has some command over electricity but uses it to create anachronistic inventions, so yes, there is steamtech.
Actually there are several Touched who are not women, including a black doctor and a white male aristocrat, but for the most part the cases seem to be concentrated outside the ruling class, something that didn’t escape the attention of Lord Massen (Pip Torrens) who wants his mysterious council to protect the British Empire and counter the ambitions “for those whom ambition was never meant.”
This approach is already giving me a sour vibe. One of the reasons people could gravitate to Buffy as a feminist story is actually that it wasn’t such an obvious one. The characters were good characters before they were symbols, and that drew you into the message. You don’t even need to lean too much on the patriarchy vs. women theme in this setting, given that “Victorian” is a modern adjective for “puritanical and repressed.” And yet, Whedon still sees the need. In the words of Willow Rosenberg, The Nevers isn’t dropping hints, it’s dropping anvils.
Otherwise this show has a young decadent who’s a friend of Amalia’s wealthy patron, a truly nasty surgeon (with an American accent), a street detective who’s already doing a better job playing Mister Vimes than the guy on AMC’s The Watch, and an insane (or at least extremely irritating) serial killer who has assembled her own little team of supervillains. Indeed, this show seems to allude to superhero comics a lot more than Buffy or Firefly did, with Amalia being more civic-minded than the early Buffy, with her and her patron creating a little urban “orphanage” where people like her can have sanctuary and support.
This show has some potential (so to speak) and a lot of stuff that could work very well, and it certainly appeals to the premise of “What if you had Buffy, but Steampunk and with cool British accents?” Plus which, it’s HBO, so you get at least one shot of tits and people say “Fuck” more than once. The problem is that while all the critics seem to think The Nevers borrows too much from Whedon’s previous tropes, to me it doesn’t feel enough like a Whedon show. The dialogue and action don’t have the snap, crackle and pop I’ve come to expect from his best work. With the notable exception of Amalia and Patience, the warm character relationships aren’t there and it’s a lot harder to care.
In fact The Nevers is almost as much of a dull grey slog as either Justice League, which means either the Victorian Era is too depressing for some people, or Whedon learned the wrong things from Snyder. Even when Buffy, Angel and Firefly were handling very serious subjects, they didn’t usually take themselves too seriously (and with Buffy, they started to suck once they did). If one is going to take a fantastical approach to the 19th Century, one might be better off starting with the tongue-in-cheek approach of The Wild, Wild West. (the 60’s TV show, not the Will Smith movie, for Gad’s sakes)