10 Recent Sci-Fi TV Shows (You Gave Up On Too Soon)

The Tick was precisely everything anyone familiar with the comics could have wanted from a TV adaptation. It deviated from the source material just enough to feel like its own thing, whilst still remaining faithful enough to the comics that it didn't lose the ridiculous tone that made the comics so brilliant in the first place. This was also most likely kind of the problem with The Tick and the reason people either gave up on it, or didn't even give it a chance to begin with.

Despite being well appreciated among comic book fans The Tick's following is still very much of the cult variety and it's kind of understandable why people would be turned off. Unlike other underground comic adaptations - The Boys or Preacher, for example - The Tick didn't promise out and out gory action in almost every frame. What it promised was a weird, surreal, self-referential, meta-fictional superhero story, and if you weren't familiar with how great that already was on paper then you probably wouldn't dive head first into it.

Which is a shame because The Tick delivered in every department. The writing skewered almost every trope we've come to expect from superhero movies and TV shows, whilst still managing to be one long love letter to superheroes and comic books at the same time. And do we need to mention how phenomenal Peter Serafinowicz is as the titular Tick? No, we don't, because he's a national treasure and everything he touches turns to gold.