The Tick

If the sight of a big, blue butt is a deal-breaker, switch off now.

It's Amazon pilot season, which means it's time to get random.

The Tick began life as a logo, became a comic book character, obtained perhaps his greatest success in an inimitable animated series. His live action incarnation was... less successful. More costumed sitcom than action adventure, thanks to budgetary concerns, it was a witty romp with a strong awareness of the world of superheroes it was parodying. The Tick's complete and repeated inability to penetrate a jerky Superman expy's 'glasses and hairdo' disguise even when he sees him take the glasses off was priceless, and the line 'you killed the Immortal' surely deserves some place in media history.

But that was then and this is now, and with the genre riding high it's apparently time for another live action reinvention. This time it's Peter Serafinowicz donning the blues, with Griffin Newman as his sidekick Arthur. The pilot hits a lot of familiar beats, including the Tick trashing Arthur's apartment looking for his hidden HQ, but there's a darker edge here. Arthur first appears in civilian clothes - something that never happened in either the animated or previous live action shows - and only acquires a very techno-looking incarnation of his moth suit in the closing seconds. His history is also tragically expanded, having been obsessed with tracking the supposedly deceased supervillain the Terror since his father became collateral damage in the defeat of the City's former superteam, the Flag Five. There is even a hint that the nigh invulnerable Tick, with the reflexes of an Olympic level jungle cat and the strength of a bus stop full of men, is a manifestation of Arthur's subconscious, although his pummeling of villains is real enough.

There's actually something almost sinister about the Tick's grin in the face of
Arthur's more gritty origin storyline.

For all its familiarity, The Tick is a new beast, and where its live-action forerunner eschewed one-off mayhem for sitcom, this version is front-loaded with arc plots and even mythology, opening with the arrival of the world's first superhero, possibly from space. Jackie Earle Hayley, fresh from being a creepy bastard on Preacher brings a potentially recurring creepy bastard presence to The Tick as the supposedly deceased Terror. It is also a very beautifully made series, with some truly sumptuous cityscapes serving to make the City itself more of a presence.

There is some significant tonal dissonance between the Tick's trademark superheroic nonsense - "You're standing there, in your way, but you're a better door than you are a window, so open yourself up, step through yourself and join me over here." - and Arthur's tragic history and mental illness (in the animated series his sister Dot worried that he wasn't dating; here she's worried that he's skipping his meds and might be involuntarily confined by the police.) That this is deliberate is clear from the juxtaposition of a radio discussion of the Flag Five being 'blinded with weaponised syphilis and then shot to death', and a later flashback to the brutal reality of the scene as it plays out in front of the young Arthur. The question, I guess, is whether that dissonance would be the series' hallmark or its undoing. In a more crowded superhero market, the creators are clearly going for something in a darker line of satire. It's a risky bid with the Tick, but could work. I do find myself hoping that we get a chance to find out.