Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
Considering that the X-Men franchise stars characters that go through genetic mutations that set them apart from the baseline human population, change is built into the franchise. But loyal X-Men fans like myself also have to put up with another, sometimes less welcome kind of change, the changes that come in every X-Men adaptation.
While Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, and Avengers fans all have faithful live-action adaptations to point to, X-Men fans stand on shakier ground. Across 10 movies, 3 cartoons and 2 live-action TV shows, X-fans have a mixed bag when it comes to accurate adaptations. I’ve been a fan of the franchise for 25 years, and my definitive adaptation remains the ’90s Fox cartoon, most known for its rad costumes, characters shouting each other’s names, and censors prohibiting the heroes from really fighting. And I actually love most of the movies, even though they have major problems (who has six claws and makes every damn story about himself? This guy!) that keep them from really feeling like the X-Men to me. And then there’s Legion, an absolutely brilliant show starring an unrecognizable adaptation of a D-list (at best?) Marvel mutant. If you want to see the X-Men of the comics on screen, you’re gonna have to be super lenient.
That’s why The Gifted, Fox’s current live-action X-Men drama series, has taken me by surprise. The show from the Burn Notice guy airing on the network that developed the gleefully inaccurate baby Batman drama Gotham has somehow captured the X-Men’s spirit more than three film trilogies.
The Gifted doesn’t top Legion’s imaginativeness, but showrunner Noah Hawley didn’t craft the FX series to be comic accurate. He used the New Mutants comics as a jumping off point to tell a story that feels X-Men-y at times but isn’t restricted by canon. The Gifted, on the other hand, shows what a series can do while staying within familiar terrain.
While Legion was genre-defying avante-pop art, Matt Nix’s Gifted is unashamedly a superhero soap opera, just like the X-Men comics. Chris Claremont’s 16-year run on Uncanny X-Men put characters fans loved in impossible situation after impossible situation, as they dealt with death, resurrection, and plenty of clones–and felt every single emotion those extreme situations elicited. The Gifted is still a young show, but it’s digging into those emotions more and more with each episode, as our heroes struggle to clear the hurdles of obstacles like surprise pregnancies and mind-tampering. With a cast comprised of adults, young adults, and teenagers, the show delivers angst across multiple generations. Cross-generational drama is part of the X-Men comics, particularly when a teenaged Kitty Pryde was a member of the senior X-Men team.
The show also has a leg up on the movies when it comes to the kinds of stories it’s telling. The X-movies have had a villain problem since they moved past Magneto in 2000’s X-Men. The movies steered clear of the A-list comic villains for a while (whither Mr. Sinister?!), choosing to loosely adapt one-off X-foe William Stryker in 2003’s X2: X-Men United and offer up truly watered-down versions of Dark Phoenix, Juggernaut, and the Hellfire Club in subsequent films (I’m a fan of Oscar Isaac’s grandiose hair stylist Apocalypse, but I recognize I’m in the minority here).
One film that didn’t have a villain problem was 2014’s X-Men: Days of Future Past, and that’s why The Gifted’s choice of primary opposition is so satisfying. Both that film and the new show pit the mutants against versions of the Sentinels. Operating on a TV budget, The Gifted eschews the lumbering purple robots of the comics and movie and instead features the government-sponsored Sentinel Services, an organization led by humans and populated by a fleet of heavily-armed human commandos, their ranks enhanced by a number of killer robots.
The show makes up for this comic inaccuracy by placing the heroes in situations that directly mirror the comics and, to my delight, the ’90s cartoon. The Mutant Underground fights Sentinel Services in alleyways and prison compounds, just like they did in the 1992 cartoon. In fact, there are so many scenes that directly mirror that first season–like a shot of the mutants evading capture while breaking out of a government installation.
Polaris even spends time in a detention center, just like Beast did in those early cartoon episodes, and her powers are restrained by a collar similar to the ones worn on the anti-mutant island Genosha in the comics and cartoon. The Gifted‘s most recent episode, “EXit Strategy,” even has a moment that 100% parallels a moment in the X-Men Season 1 finale “The Final Decision,” as mutant after mutant volunteers to run a suicide mission. Also, the show has established that the ’90s X-Men theme is available as a ringtone in The Gifted universe. This show knows what it’s homaging.
The soap opera tone and back-against-the-wall action sequences make the show feel like the X-Men, but it’s really the cast that puts the show over the top. The X-movies never cared about any characters outside of the exhausting Wolverine/Professor X/Magneto/Mystique rectangle. The films underserved iconic (iconic!) heroes like Storm, Rogue, Colossus, Iceman, and Nightcrawler, turned Jean Grey’s definitive storyline into fodder for Wolverine’s man-pain, and straight-up botched Banshee, Emma Frost, Darwin, Psylocke, and Angel. The X-Men are an ensemble, and the fact that their films have been dominated by three old white guys and Jennifer Lawrence is a crime.
The Gifted does not have that problem. Without access to Wolverine and (presumably, I admit) any of the A-list X-Men, they’ve been able to create an ensemble comprised of characters that are on equal ground. And unlike Legion, which featured no comic characters outside of the lead and main villain, The Gifted cast is stacked with characters fans like me love. Polaris! Blink! Thunderbird! Even Sage and Dreamer! Aside from Polaris, these are mostly deep cut characters even for casual comic fans, but they’ve all been given time to shine on The Gifted. Blink took the lead in the first episode while Thunderbird has had more to do recently. Eclipse (Sean Teale) is featured regularly, but his storylines don’t come at the expense of other characters; he’s not Wolverine. The cast feels a lot like the kind of lineup you’d see in the supporting X-books, like X-Factor or X-Force or Excalibur, where lesser-known mutants forged bonds and underwent rich character development.
There are scenes of the Mutant Underground hanging out in their dilapidated compound that feel more like the X-Men comics than anything I’ve seen on TV or film, scenes where the mutants help each other (like Thunderbird and Blink’s training scene) or deal with moral gray areas (like, everything involving Dreamer). Uncanny X-Men was frequently a quiet comic where intense interpersonal drama was given the same weight, if not more, than a world-ending crisis. The Gifted gets that, and it’s a plus that scenes of mutants angsting in a mansion are way cheaper to pull off than big stunts.
Of course The Gifted isn’t exactly like the comics. The characters do use their comic codenames and feature spot-on embellishments (Polaris’ green hair, John’s thunderbird tattoo), but they don’t wear costumes. That makes sense as the Mutant Underground wants to keep a low profile; that plot point just hits home that while this feels like the X-Men, this team isn’t the X-Men. The show also splits its time between the mutant protagonists and the human parents of the Strucker teens. I’m not going to complain about the great performances by Amy Acker and Stephen Moyer, but the comics have never focused on human characters the way The Gifted does. I’d also like to see more mutants from the comics, specifically villains. The focus on Sentinel Services works for now, but it’d be nice to see the show juggle multiple threats the way the comics did. The show name dropped the Mutant Liberation Front, so give us Tempo and Reaper and Wildside!
Like with any X-adaptation, The Gifted doesn’t get it 100% right, but it gets things right about the X-Men (the tone, the character dynamics) that the movies have never nailed. With two live-action shows and three X-Men movies on the way next year (!), there’s no shortage of mutant content out there. I’m just glad that not only has The Gifted proven itself a worthy entry in the franchise, it’s actually adapted aspects of my beloved heroes that I’ve seen overlooked for almost 20 years.
