Series 1: https://youtu.be/06rueu_fh30
Series 2: https://youtu.be/MN8fFM1ZdWo
This has been excellent; it fully rose to the great potential in the basic idea and the characters, even the intially apparently irredeemable ones have, by the end of this series, a reasonably nuanced picture of them given. There are number of storylines and backstories that are being well dealt with - the flashbacks, for example are clear and well-structured; I have found these days that many modern series are so anxious to give us the full picture of characters and situations that the storytelling becomes clogged and confusing.
The performances, by unknowns as it should be, are uniformly excellent - Chace Crawford as the Deep is particularly…good (!) and as Homelander, the leader of the superheroes with a clearly non-accidental similarity in appearance to Captain America, Antony Starr is excellent. Characters are modern in outlook but one does not have the sense that they are predictable cut-outs in terms of their views and attitudes for today’s world.
So excellent start and here’s to the second series…
And the second series has kept well up to the promise of the first. Good character development and the new figures are highly involving. By the end of this series it has become quite bit darker and the cynical jokiness of the first part of Series 1 has been very effectively darkened. Kudos to the creators for not going down the easy path of more of the same.