Review: Amazon’s ‘The Tick’ updates the superhero spoof for the streaming age, for better and worse

Amazon’s new The Tick marks the third time Ben Edlund’s big blue comic book lug has hit the small screen—this following a 1994 animated series and 2001’s short-lived live-action effort. But to call it another superhero reboot would be a disservice to both this quite enjoyable iteration and the character’s concept as a whole. It’s more a refresh of The Tick, keeping the spoof relevant as the idea of a live-screen superhero has quickly evolved in recent years.

In the spirit of its streaming platform release, this Tick is thoroughly a product of the Marvel-Netflix era of superhero series. Its pilot, released back in August 2016 as a public pitch to make this full run, declared as much in fairly blatant visual terms. Our titular hero and his soon-to-be sidekick, both in overly-designed costume updates, took to the North Brooklyn waterfronts of so many a Daredevil setting to bathe thug-fights in grimy streetlight yellows. When the series got its official pickup from Amazon, Tick’s costume was altered to something less grotesquely textured (true to winking form, that’s called out) and the lighting got a bit more white-balanced, but its pastiche of the Marvel-Netflix universe has remained—and with that, confronting those Marvel-Netflix faults even to its detriment.

For the first time, The Tick is now a fully serialized product. The once-episodic nature of the title is gone in favor of a fully-formed arc, with the Tick’s moth-like buddy Arthur at the heart of it. As established in the pilot, Arthur’s father was matter-of-factly killed in a battle between the Terror (perhaps the most “classic” villain of the Tick’s rogues gallery) and the Flag Five (basically the Avengers of this world, given the “lamest possible” name by Edlund). Like a dorkier Batman, Arthur, an accountant, has since been fighting the emotional and psychological demons of seeing his father’s death, all the while building a case that the thought-dead Terror is still alive. Parallel to that, we’re given the humanizing story of the one-eyed villain Ms. Lint (Yara Martinez), named for her electric power’s side effect of static cling.

The setup gives The Tick the emotional core you can feel it’s reaching for but takes away from a lot of what has made prior adaptations so fun to watch. Quotable, laugh-out-loud lines still come regularly enough, but it’s missing the big, absurd ideas that made the animated series so memorable. While it gives Arthur a cohesive arc of becoming a hero, this version never nears the cartoon’s brilliance of, say, a man with a chair face forever burning only part of his name into the moon’s face (and that forever remaining in the visible canon).

Likewise, in bending to the “street-level” strategy of the small-screen Marvel lineup, The Tick loses much of its prior scope. In both the 1994 and 2001 takes, superheroes were abound, with Tick often having coffee with a Batman parody, Wonder Woman spoof, or some other obvious knock-off. Keeping with the Daredevil structure specifically, here we pretty much just get a team-up with Overkill (Scott Speiser), an explicitly designated antihero who updates the Tick cartoon’s “Big Shot” in its Punisher mockery. Thanks to his not being on Saturday morning broadcast television, this faux-Punisher curses constantly and murders people with comical brutality.

That’s not to say there aren’t exceptions, though. In some rare moments where The Tick isn’t alluding to potentially larger heroes and organizations (A.E.G.I.S. here has as much of a presence as S.H.I.E.L.D. gets on Netflix), we get hints of that old Edlund brilliance. A brief flashback gives us the feline hero wonderfully named Cat-Man-Dude; Alan Tudyk, apparently typecast as an effete robot since Rogue One, is perfect as the sentient, house music-composing voice of Overkill’s “Dangerboat”; and in the background, there’s an ongoing battle between this world’s Superman and V.M.L.—a giant, naked nitwit the news has dubbed Very Large Man.

In the title role, the always-dynamic Peter Serafinowicz is far better than his strangely-scant screen time would suggest. He lacks the natural oafishness and lantern jaw that made Patrick Warburton such a fan favorite, and he literally doesn’t fill the suit nearly as well, but his delivery is indisputably on-point. Like so many Batmen before him, it may forever be debated whether his finer acting can compare to the burlier other guy, leaving us only to agree that the animated voice guy was definitely the best. (Speaking of: keep an ear out for animated Tick voice Townsend Coleman in a cameo as an author/dog.) Nightmare on Elm Street and Watchmen‘s Jackie Earle Haley, playing the Terror, is just as ideally cast as every other time he’s been a gross little withered freak.

At its best, 2017’s Tick works when it goes so street-scale-small that it comes out the other side. Unfortunately, it takes until more than halfway through the show’s six-episode run to get to the pedestrian joys of the Tick-Arthur roommate dynamic, a suburban birthday party, and the image of Tick beaming from the passenger seat of a compact car—not to mention the arrival of fantastically un-super characters like Lint’s douche-hipster, man-bunned ex-husband and Arthur’s exceedingly amiable and strange stepfather. But it’s a worthwhile trip.

The real problem with The Tick is that, now more than a year removed from its initial pilot, its whole six-episode first offering still feels very unfinished. Running less than three hours in total, it succeeds in constructing the future dynamic but never feels like a completed product. It’s not even so much like seeing a pilot as sneaking a leaked pilot: even the simplest green-screen effects look noticeably rough and, despite the heavy participation of Academy Award-winning cinematographer Wally Pfister, there often seems to have been absolutely no color grading done on the frequently amateur-looking shots. There are fan films that look more professional than this in terms of both photography and costumery.

Yet, for all its faults, The Tick is still more fun to watch—and far tighter—than the majority of the Marvel-Netflix work it’s pastiching. If we accept it as the feature film-length pilot it seems to be, then it’s exactly what a pilot should be: flawed but promising, and worth pushing through; a modest, demitasse “spoon” for the “SPOOOOOOOOOOON!!!” to hopefully come.

Grade: B-

The Tick
Studio: Amazon Studios
Rating: TV-14
Cast: Peter Serafinowicz, Griffin Newman, Yara Martinez, Jackie Earle Haley, Valorie Curry, Scott Speiser, Michael Cerveris

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