Black Lightning Re-Begins
About a week ago, I took in the first 3 eps of the CW's new BLACK LIGHTNING. The advance trailer for this one looked _really_ good. The series, unfortunately, doesn't live up to it but it has plenty of potential.
The show is much more like a sequel to the original Tony Isabella comic series from the '70s than an adaptation. Here, Jefferson Pierce has moved up from high-school teacher to principal and retired from the superhero business many years earlier. He has an ex-wife with whom he's trying to reconcile and his daughters are already teenagers. In the comics, they eventually become the heroines Thunder and Lightning and after a few eps, the series is already heading in that direction with the eldest.
Though the show has the sort of soap elements one has come to expect from the CW, it's quite a bit more violent than the network's previous DCverse shows--a welcome change. Perhaps as a fallout from the enormous expense of LEGENDS OF TOMORROW, it also seems to be operating on a much more modest budget than any of those other shows and it does strain at its limitations at times (in the third ep, a charismatic preacher organizes what must be one of the most economically staged protest marches in tv history). Because the show is taking up the story at a point after a LOT of important things have already happened, a lot of the dialogue in the pilot ep is overburdened with anti-naturalistic exposition, trying to bring the audience up to speed by having characters explain things to one another that they already know. That script really could have used a few more passes, but this problem begins to smooth out as the series continues.
Something I found a bit of an odd choice is the decision to so often mimic LUKE CAGE. In everything from its vintage soundtrack selections to its vintage autos, its absolutely hulking lead (Cress Williams as BL is a massive man) to his Marvel-style reluctant hero routine and "black Jesus" persona (in the universe of the show, people in the community actually call Jefferson "black Jesus"), BLACK LIGHTNING riffs hard on the Marvel Netflix show at every turn. Part of this is perhaps unavoidable--the characters were born of the same era and milieu and if one wants to invoke it in both, there are going to be similarities--but I think if I was running the show, I'd try to minimize them. The creators of BLACK LIGHTNING clearly thought otherwise.
In the comic, archvillain Tobias Whale was an albino-ized top-to-bottom knock-off of the Kingpin from Marvel, right down to the ascot; the show's version of the same character, on the other hand, couldn't be more Marvel's Lonnie "Tombstone" Lincoln if he whispered his dialogue. Still, Marvin "Krondon" Jones III plays the character as an incredibly vicious, ugly motherfucker who steals every scene he's in, a GREAT villain persona (it's hard to get the image of him out of one's head). Time and further writing will tell whether the character lives up to his potential.
That's what will make or break the show itself. I'm going to follow it and see where it leads.