Legion Premiere Review: 6 Ups & 2 Downs From 'Chapter 1'

4. A Truly Original Superhero Series

There are a lot of comic book shows on TV right now, the vast majority of which contain superheroes. The tone and quality can differ wildly as you move from Netflix to ABC to The CW to Fox, but there are some general consistencies you can expect to see in terms of overarching narrative and character (good guy saves his/her city from bad guy).

NBC have recently moved to provide an antidote to this apparent superhero fatigue (though that in itself is overstated; people never complain about law drama fatigue, or workplace sitcom fatigue) with Powerless, a superhero show without superheroes. Legion takes the idea of doing something different with the genre to its extreme, delivering a wholly unique comic book TV show.

In its first episode we aren't tasked with fighting crime, we aren't presented with a recognisable superhero figure or, for a lot of its runtime, discernible superpowers. It may be billed as an X-Men series, but the only similarity to that world is the word "mutant", otherwise this instalment owes more to influences from Stanley Kubrick to Wes Anderson than it does Marvel Comics.