When I started watching this show I didn’t know it was based on a Dark Horse comic book limited series by motherfucking Gerard Way from My Chemical Romance. I don’t know that until halfway through Season 1. Not that it would have particularly swayed me against giving the show a shot.

But seriously, Gerard Way? Yuck.

I started watching Season 1 in December, 2021. I finished it in July, 2022. There are ten episodes. If that doesn’t tell you everything about it right now, not much I’ll write after this will either, I suppose.

The Premise

Bear with me here. On October 1st, 1989 (exactly two years after I was born IF YOU ALL MUST KNOW), a few dozen women all over the world, who weren’t previously pregnant, suddenly went into labor and gave birth to a child. This isn’t explained at all for the rest of the season. A billionaire, Sir Reginald Hargreeves (Colm Feore), decides to buy seven of the babies from their unwilling mothers and raise them as his own. And by “raise them”, I mean “torture their childhoods with strict, exploitative regimens designed to maximize their innate super abilities”.

–Tom Hopper plays Number One (Luther Hargreeves, “Spaceboy“). He has super strength. Sir Reginald injected him with gorilla serum once to save is life, turning him into a large, hairy, half-man half-gorilla beast. He’s gross.
–David Castañeda plays Number Two (Diego Hargreeves, “The Kraken“). He has, like, super ninja skills or something. He’s not very interesting.
–Emmy Raver-Lampman plays Number Three (Allison Hargreeves, “The Rumor“). She can persuade a person to do or think exactly as she says just by starting a sentence with “I heard a rumor that…”, which also helped her land a job as an famous celebrity. She and Luther want to fuck each other.
–Robert Sheehan plays Number Four (Klaus Hargreeves, “The Séance“). He sees and talks to dead people. He has been doing drugs for 20 years and is, for all intents and purposes, literally insane. He is the best character on the show by a long shot.
–Aidan Gallagher plays Number Five (Five Hargreeves, “The Boy“). He can transcend space and time, which accidentally landed him stuck in a post-apocalyptic future for around 40 years. He’s the only member of the family who is perpetually played by a teenager, and he’s a better actor than any of the rest of them.
–Justin H. Min plays Number Six (Ben Hargreeves, “The Horror“). He’s dead now and essentially serves as Klaus’ babysitter. While alive, his super power seemed to be about something related to summoning Hell creatures from a portal to the earthly realm. Sounds awful. I’m glad he’s dead.
–Elliot Page plays Number Seven (Vanya Hargreeves, “The White Violin“). She doesn’t have super powers, so she was out of all the missions and all the fun and all the reindeer games as a child. You find out later that she does have super powers, and they’re terrifying and frightening and etc.

The two other notable characters are Hazel (Cameron Britton) and Cha-Cha (Mary J. Blige), who are partners from the agency tasked with assassinating Number Five. They spend the whole season trying to track him down. They bumble a lot along the way.

There’s also a talking monkey. There are other characters too, but who cares?

ULTIMATELY, through all the convoluted bullshit, the ultimate plot of the season revolves around the Hargreeves team working toward stopping the apocalypse from which Number Five was stuck living in the aftermath for a few decades. They have eight days to figure it out.

My Half-Baked Thoughts

I’m already upset at how long the Premise section had to be. This is one of those TV adaptations where there is just so much worldbuilding from the original source material that it’s very difficult to pull it off successfully. I’m glad I learned a few episodes in that it was originally a comic book series, because I wouldn’t be able to entirely forgive an original TV series that attempts to cram a glut of information with breakneck pacing and nonstop exposition dialogue.

There’s a whole lot to take in as you’re watching the first few episodes, and it’s hard to simultaneously try to give a shit about any of the characters. Character development is disappointingly paper thin across the board with a few exceptions (Klaus, Hazel, and MAYBE Vanya if I had to pick a third). Range of emotion from the cast spans a whole colorful spectrum from “mopey” to “angry” to “slightly mopier” to “on drugs” (Klaus).

Number Five has the most interesting backstory, personality, and temperament. While I never really suspended disbelief that he’s a 58-year-old trapped in a teenager’s body, Aidan Gallagher does a fantastic job with the role and he’s probably the most good-looking adolescent actor you’ll find on TV in the last, like, 40 years. Beats the fuck out of James Van Der Beek, who played a teenager in Dawson’s Creek at age 37. If you’re a teenage girl you can slap a poster of Gallagher’s mug on your wall next to, I don’t know, who do teenage girls like these days? Danny Bonaduce?

Over the course of the ten episodes (which, again, took me seven months to get through), you witness the seven Hargreeves children attempt to cope with the death of their abusive father, an event that brought them all together for the first time in adulthood. Each has their own (thin) backstory and their own way of dealing with the loss. The narrative gets chaotic when attempts to solve Reginald’s possible murder mixes in with attempts to save the world in eight days; mixes in Cha-Cha and Hazel’s attempts to assassinate Five; mixes in Vanya’s kanoodling with a love interest who repeatedly nudges her into activating her dormant powers (and he turns out to be an ex-murderer who will cause the apocalypse…maybe). Chaotic narrative != immersive television.

With so much shit going on constantly, it becomes impossible to connect emotionally with any character in the family. Any one of them could have gotten horribly killed and I probably would’ve been in the bathroom while it was happening and not even notice for three episodes.

With that all said, my favorite characters are Hazel and Cha-Cha. Their chemistry is much more interesting than anything going on among the family members, and their particular scenes are slow enough by comparison to allow room for actual three-dimensional humanization beyond “I’M SAD ABOUT THIS” and “I’M MAD ABOUT THIS”. Hazel falls in love with a middle-aged owner of a donut shop, which causes him to reevaluate his whole existence as a time-travelling assassin. That adds a lot of tension in his relationship and Cha-Cha. I found it amusing to witness Hazel be this really calm, kind, thoughtful, and soft-spoken man throughout the whole season considering his line of work. And Mary J. Blige is an excellent foil, spending most of the season visibly frustrated with Hazel’s behavior.

The season ends on a cliffhanger. The events that lead up to stopping Vanya from causing the apocalypse are actually the very mechanism that sets it in motion. Funny how that works, innit? So the family all hold hands and Five jumps them all in the past. Together, they’ll all try again.

Worth the Watch?

Eh. The Umbrella Academy has the kind of macabre, surreal campiness reminiscent of shows like Dead Like Me or Buffy the Vampire Slayer. While enjoyable enough, I find this kind of show hard to binge (obviously). These are the kinds of shows that are fun in the moment, but very hard to muster up some motivation to move on to the next episode. And when you aren’t watching it, you don’t really think about it.

I liked it enough plan on watching Season 2 some day. Possibly. Maybe.

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