DOOM PATROL (SEASON 1, 2019)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *irony*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *metaphysical, psychological*

Of the various jejune devices this show's first season uses to ironically "deconstruct" its superhero subject matter, one of the most tedious is the fact that all 15 episodes have titles that stick some word or words in front of the word "patrol." Thus all the episodes have titles like "Jane Patrol," "Ezekiel Patrol," and even "Doom Patrol Patrol."

I have a title that I think would have applied equally well to all the episodes of the first season (and probably the other seasons as well):

"Snark Patrol."

History: DC Comics' original superhero title from the 1960s, THE DOOM PATROL, was a straight superhero-adventure title with large doses of comedy relief and with heroes who were all damaged in some way-- a cyborg with a human brain, a radioactive man swathed in bandages, and so on. In the late 1980s, British writer Grant Morrison, ostensibly a fan of the original series, produced a wild absurdist take on some of the original teammates, as well new additions. The Morrison tenure had ironic aspects to it, but its focus emphasized dazzling flights of the imagination.

Not so the four seasons of the DOOM PATROL teleseries. The writers incorporate various ideas from Morrison in the course of the first season, but shoehorned into a clunky plotline in which the four members of the current Patrol-- analogues of the comics-characters Robotman, Crazy Jane, Elasti-Girl and Negative Man-- are forced by supercriminal Mister Nobody to seek the missing scientist who brought them all together, Niles Caulder, a.k.a. The Chief. But at no point do the scripts incorporate any sense of wonder at all the bizarre entities the Patrol encounters. Instead, the writers substitute a repetitive "what the fuck now" attitude about everything, including the protagonists' own revelations about their own inner demons. 

The most I can say for the series is that once or twice a given episode improved on something I found weak in Morrison's original run. For instance, in keeping with the "gloom and doom" mood of eighties comics, Morrison changed the beneficent figure of Niles Caulder into a manipulative monster who changed the heroes from ordinary humans into freaks so that he The Chief could play God. In the interests of making the Chief viable for an ongoing series, the writers kept that trope but gave the Chief a somewhat altruistic reason for his actions. Still, the occasional improvement does not make up for all of the heavy-handed snarkiness.

More interesting for me than the series proper are speculations about why PATROL turned out so badly. The show was one of the last projects for the streaming service DC Universe, which perhaps inevitably ran out of money and was absorbed into HBO Max during PATROL's run. Prior to PATROL, two of the big-name producers attached to it-- Greg Berlanti and Geoff Johns-- had worked on a four-season series, TITANS. But since that was based on a more typical superhero title, its showrunner Greg Walker played things straight.

I won't put the whole burden of badness on the PATROL showrunner Jeremy Carver, since he was probably told by his superiors to incorporate more absurdist humor into this adaptation. But in the final analysis, he's probably mostly responsible for the repetitive tone and the lack of imagination. But then, DOOM PATROL is hardly the only superhero project of the 21st century to suffer from indifference to the sense of wonder.

Wrapping up, I may not like most of the characters, but all of the actors comported themselves well, particularly Diane Guerrero as Jane. There are some "woke" touches to the first season, such as blather about toxic masculinity (some of which is also found in Morrison) and in making the Jane character Hispanic for no particular reason. But those nods to political correctness didn't damage the storylines as they have many MCU streaming shows, and if I had to choose the lesser of two evils, I suppose I'd have to choose boring snark over tedious lectures.