The Nevers Series Premiere Review

The latest game news from IGN - one of my fave channels ever - check it out This is a review of the Season 1 premiere of HBO's The Nevers, which is currently available to stream. [poilib element="accentDivider"] It’s a weird time to be reviewing a Joss Whedon creation. Even if he stepped away from HBO’s latest show a while back, his trademark quips and signature obsessions are all over the pilot episode of The Nevers, which he also wrote and directed. The series was already going to be a hard sell, given its steampunk Victorian chaos and—let’s face it—a cast largely made up of women. But that could have also made it a very exciting endeavor, too. What has resulted thus far, however, is nothing of the sort: a sort of pale, one-dimensional repackaging of Whedon’s Greatest Hits. Namely, strong ladies constantly being degraded while snappily comebacking their way through it, only with powers! [poilib element="poll" parameters="id=997b0e98-ef47-4063-b82f-532c04138175"] The basic story is this: three years prior to the events of now, a lot of women and some other marginalized folks became “touched” following a bizarre sky event. Their “turns,” or powers inherited during this oddity, vary wildly and have no real connection. Some people can manipulate energy, others are healers and entrancing singers, while others are simply very, very large. There’s a steampunk lady X-Men vibe to the lot of it, but the series really fails to give us any reason to make these people and their corresponding gifts compelling. Most of the ones we meet are under the care of Amalia True (Laura Donnelly) and her best friend Penance Adair (Ann Skelly) at an orphanage, but there are many others out there, unprotected from the homicidal one, Maladie (Amy Manson), or the shadowy organization that’s hunting them down—either for themselves or for Denis O’Hare’s creepster doctor. There’s also a bunch of angry white men, which at this point should be of no surprise to anyone. None of how it all blends together is particularly seamless and interrogative, however—preferring to skim the surface rather than go a bit deeper. All of it is quite muddled by its more hokey, cringe-y elements of its dialogue and character situations. That isn’t to say that there isn’t some goodness to be had here. Laura Donnelly is a wonderful actor we’re excited to see more of—someone many may remember from Outlander where we got not nearly enough of her as Jamie Fraser’s sister. She is clearly a captivating star. (As is James Norton, who plays the pansexual lothario Hugo Swan with aplomb.) Donnelly makes a fine home for herself here despite the oftentimes clunky scenarios and dialogue she’s been given, and a particularly embarrassing scene where—whoopsie daisy!—her dress comes off in a "hilarious" (to whom we are not so sure) turn of fisticuffs. The show also leaves something to be desired in the VFX department, but the costumes of Game of Thrones’ Michele Clapton and the cinematography does bring its own joy to an otherwise boring first episode. [ignvideo url="https://www.ign.com/videos/2021/03/23/hbos-the-nevers-official-trailer-2021-olivia-williams-james-norton"] It is in these moments we see the worst parts of Whedon that were always there, magnified under the scrutiny of the moment: these women do not feel real, only gawked at as they flip their hair and do an eyeroll at all the casual sexism they endure. They feel like brutalized and taunted (but still sexy!) playthings for the men in and watching (creating?) the show. It’s all spectacle without any heft, try though The Nevers might to be zeitgeist-y as well as fun, telling stories of otherized people taking back their power. In the end, though, it all feels several years behind the societal conversations of the moment, failing to really make interesting choices that push the characters—and in turn the audience—to question why patriarchal and cisgendered norms should be abolished. And it just, frankly, feels so damn male, in both its point of view and its gaze upon its actors. Which, when telling a story largely about women, is just plain disheartening and embarrassing in 2021. Though it will be interesting to see how this show evolves under its new showrunner (Philippa Goslett, writer of Little Ashes)’s tutelage, what aired this weekend as a preview of what’s to come was a generally lackluster sum of parts, inextricable from its trademark Whedonisms, which make it feel dated by about 10 to 20 years or so. Visually fine, the ultimately hokey and one-dimensional “reveal” at the end of the pilot doesn’t leave us asking more questions and begging for more, it just leaves us going, "eh." [widget path="global/article/imagegallery" parameters="albumSlug=hbo-max-spotlight-april-2021&captions=true"]

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