‘The Tick’ Does What More Superhero Shows Should Be Doing: Embracing Big Weird

Amazon Pilot Season is upon us, and the three comedy pilots that Amazon wants us to choose from are all up and available to view (you don’t even have to be a Prime member). One of these pilots is The Tick, the third TV adaptation of the 1986 comic cook character (after a 1994 animated series and a 2001 live-action series starring Patrick Warburton). The Tick is meant to be a parody of costumed superheroes; a bulky, impervious, authoritatively-voiced paragon of heroism to whom destiny speaks. It’s also one of the weirdest and most enjoyable pieces of superhero television I’ve seen in a while.

Right off the bat, The Tick sets itself apart from almost any other superhero property in film or on television. While Marvel and DC want to root most (if not all) of their properties into a real world that, one-by-one, begins to be populated by superheroes, The Tick opens with a world that’s been populated by super beings for a century. We’re in the Age of Superheroes, to the point where there is a previous generation of superheroes (and supervillains) whose exploits get talked about on talk shows (like, for example, Whoop, hosted by Whoopi Goldberg). The upshot of this is that rather than go through all the regular motions of acclimating the world to the existence of a superhero, the world already has this alternate history that can be played with in some fun ways.

The Tick himself is played by Peter Serafinowicz, an chameleonic-voiced comedic actor who’s best known for film and TV from Shaun of the Dead to Look Around You to Spy. (Also his Alan Alda is sublime, but that’s getting us too far from the topic at hand.) His take on The Tick is aloof but filled with higher purpose, and if the writing can stay sharp on his dialogue, he can be an incredibly funny character. But what the Tick pilot does best is provide balance for The Tick in the form of his sidekick. Arthur Everest (played by Griffin Newman, who, full disclosure, is a friend) is a nervous, nerdy, obsessive guy who is haunted by a tragic past. His parents were killed by the supervillain known as the Terror, including his father getting murdered right before his eyes. This is usually the kind of setup that the main superhero gets, but The Tick isn’t bound by any kind of Earthly origin. So that story falls to Arthur, an empathetic character who provides an entry into this strange, arch world. Arthur is trying to prove that the Terror — who is assumed to have been killed by a telegenic superhero called Superion — is in fact still alive and running his criminal empire. Seeing as the show cast Jackie Earle Haley to play Terror, who is shown in flashback looking like a cross between Magneto and Pruneface, it’s probably a good bet that Arthur us right.

Much of the pilot is devoted to Arthur’s backstory, how he’s become this obsessive crusader, how he’s about one and a half steps ahead of a mental hospital, how his sister Dot is there for him but worries. The pilot ends on the climactic moment of Arthur about to don his superhero costume. This might be the very first sidekick origin story played as centrally important. Suddenly, The Tick gets to be weird and funny while the show grounds itself in an actual story.

Meanwhile, the comedy is just strange enough to work, especially in the ways that it plays with superhero-dom. Terror’s flashback victims include a superhero team who are felled by a weaponized strain of syphilis (which, between this and Florence Foster Jenkins, is syphilis having a pop-cultural resurgence?). It’s the kind of thing that reminds me of an Adult Swim cartoon like The X-Tacles. This is a compliment.

Superhero television is not what superhero film is, in terms of massive success, but we’re certainly getting more superheroics on TV than ever before. They group into certain types of shows: the darker shows like Netflix’s Jessica Jones, Daredevil, Luke Cage trilogy, the more fun ones like The Flash and Supergirl, and the shows that keep trying to nail the balance, like Agents of SHIELD, Gotham, and Arrow. While all those shows have aspects that differentiate them from each other, they’re essentially chasing the same dragon. The Tick might as well exist in a different universe than all those shows, in its tone and delivery. Which is what makes it a massively refreshing entry in the superhero pantheon.