Eight painful episodes in (I'm a television masochist!) and I'm stabbing a stake in the show's bone-headed heart. (Pretty sure ABC agrees; after the eighth episode--and 13 were contracted--that sultry, smoky-voiced, ABC promo guy called it the "season finale.")
Where did the show go wrong? Let me count the ways...
The best actor on the show was a 2,000 pound, teleporting, CGI bulldog. I loved that guy. The rest of the cast? Not so much. The hero, the mute king Black Bolt, comes off as a drunken, constipated mime, prone to bouts of horrific mugging that would kick Jerry Lewis out of France.
Look, the show had a really cool built-in concept of a bunch of neato mutants living on the moon. Boom! Instant awesome! But the TV Gods chose to do the dumbest thing possible: the Inhuman gang is separated and tossed onto earth. Instead of political intrigue, we get Karnak wedged into a love triangle on a secret weed farm. Medusa? The strong first lady married to Black Bolt with the wiggly tendrils of hair? In the first episode, her hair's chopped off. Triton, the green-skinned amphibious guy, my long-time fave of the Inhumans? They "kill" him off in the first three minutes of the first episode. I knew he wasn't dead, not really, just comic-book dead. So I suffered through seven awful episodes to see him come back. He did. And, lo, he was as boring as my dad's socks.
There were many problems with the show. For some odd reason, earth car traffic befuddles the Inhumans. Yet, they take to skinny jeans like a second skin.
Maybe the problem was the bad guy, Maximus. Stolen from Game of Thrones, the actor pretty much reprises his "Ramsay Snow" role with a trendier haircut. Call it method acting.
Here's the deal, though: Once the Inhumans go through a complex, mandatory process of metamorphosing ("terragenesis"), they're expected to gain special powers. If they don't, they become "human" and are sent straight to the working mines. (President Trump fully endorses this show). Maximus is supposed to be villainous because he wants to free the "normal humans" from the hellish working conditions of the mines on the moon. Black Bolt and his royal family want to keep things status quo. And they're the heroes? I'm already endorsing a Maximus-Dwayne Johnson presidential run in 2020.
There's another villain, Mordis, who is described as "death itself." Guess what? Death is like an irritating child on a long car trip. "Are we there yet?" "I'm tired." "My feet hurt." "How much longer do we have to walk through this jungle?" Yep, a truly terrifying villain.
I could go on about the wise, talking wall and other fun stuff, but let's not.
ABC had huge hopes for the show. So much so that they put the first couple episodes out in theaters to launch it. No one went. No one cared. Except for hell-raising critics which is probably why it ended up on Friday nights, the dead zone for loser TV shows.
It's been said we're living in a golden age of television. Maybe we are if you watch FX, AMC, Hulu, Netflix, Amazon, and all the other outliers. It's just no one's bothered to tell the networks. The network heads still insist on serving up the same horrible crap they've been shoving at us for years. If they keep it up, they're bound to become as extinct as the Inhumans.
I don't like to celebrate failure. As a contributor of entertainment content, I mourn creative failure. So here's to the late, great "Inhumans!" I hoist a terragenesis cocktail toward you, ladies and inhumans!
Not quite as funny as The Inhumans, but I tried:
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