Powers - 'Like a Power'

Ah, the glamour of superpowers.

Full disclosure, I'm not hitting Powers, an adaptation of a Marvel Icon (the company's creator-owned line for keeping top writers in-house) comic series about a world where superpowers are just part of the status quo, at full speed. I missed the first episode, so I was sort of playing catch up through this one.

Charlie Walker is a detective with the Powers Division, a section of the LAPD dealing with superpowered crimes. Himself a former power, he is partnered with a rookie named Deena Pilgrim to investigate the murder of a superhero named Olympia, linking his death to a drug named Sway and a young woman named Calista Secor. Also involved are superpowered criminal Wolfe, who among other things stole Walker's powers, Walker's former partner Retro Girl, and dodgy teleporting power Johnny Royalle.

Powers is a grungy, street-level superpowers story, with noirish elements of constructed identity and mysterious pasts. Across these mean skies a man must fly who is not himself mean and all that. The characters are pretty much cyphers so far, but a lot of that is deliberate - we're kind of coming in in media res after all - and some is probably due to missing the pilot. The cast are pretty good, but the sense of the plot is as yet sketchy (again, that's partly the noir influence and partly missing the murder of Olympia, on which much of the current movement hangs, entirely.) It's got definite potential, anyway, and is better than the first original drama commissioned by the Playstation network necessarily deserves to expect.