‘The Umbrella Academy’ saves the day for TV comic adaptations

by Alexis Gentry · February 18, 2019

I’ll admit, I’m not normally a big fan of comic book TV adaptations. The episodic format and lower budget almost always means sacrificing the epicness and satisfying conclusions of big-screen comic book blockbusters for the sake of keeping things cheap and making people tune in episode after episode. Thankfully, Netflix’s outstanding adaptation of Gerard Way and Gabriel Bá’s The Umbrella Academy gives us our fair share of epic with a whole lot of solid character development and creativity to spare.

The Umbrella Academy began as a concept in the early 2000s while Way was becoming a rock star with My Chemical Romance, but finally made it to Dark Horse comics in 2007, immediately generating huge acclaim and winning the Eisner Award for Best Finite Series/Limited Series. Naturally, everyone was wondering when Hollywood would scoop it up for a movie, especially as we started to see the emergence of the unstoppable box office juggernaut that is the Marvel Cinematic Universe after 2008. Way even fielded questions about what was, at that time, still a film adaptation at San Diego Comic Con way back in 2010.

Behind the scenes with Gerard Way and Gabriel Bá on the set of ‘The Umbrella Academy’

Fast forward to February 2019 and we finally have the debut of The Umbrella Academy as a Netflix original series starring Ellen Paige, Tom Hopper, David Castañeda, Emmy Raver-Lampman, Robert Sheehan, Aidan Gallagher, Cameron Britton and Mary J. Blige. Right from the gate, the first episode brings viewers into the slightly-off-kilter world of our heroes. On October 1, 1989, 43 random women give birth simultaneously, despite none of them showing any sign of pregnancy. All of the children show some kind of superpowers. Sir Reginald Hargreeves, Colm Feore, manages to adopt seven of these children, raising them to save the world as The Umbrella Academy. Cut to many years into the future, Hargreeves has just died, the team has broken up, the kids have all grown into emotionally traumatized adults, and now they all have to get back together again to save the world from the apocalypse.

The children of The Umbrella Academy are assembled to save the world.

To say I was super impressed by the first season of the The Umbrella Academy would be a massive understatement. Not only did I love the world-building and production design, but I was completely drawn in by the mystery surrounding who might be the one to bring about the apocalypse, despite already knowing the answer from having read the comics. Most of all, though, I was immediately hooked by the characters.

Klaus (The Seance) and Number Five (The Boy)

Early on, Klaus, who comic fans know as The Seance, was a major standout, thanks to Sheehan’s outstanding portrayal. He’s a drug addict, a free spirit, and he really doesn’t care about anything, but he’s also so much more. He’s the heart, he’s the humor, and he’s got some of the best lines in the entire series. Then, of course, there’s Number Five, a.k.a. The Boy, a time-jumping snarky assassin who got trapped in the body of his thirteen-year-old self. Gallagher, who is a teen in real life, expertly gives us the cynicism that comes from Number Five’s old age, making us completely forget that there’s actually a young actor playing this role. Of course, Paige, who plays Vanya, the only member of the superhero squad to not have superpowers, gives us the emotional range we can expect from an actress of her calibre. Though the cast is large, Hopper, Castañeda and Raver-Lampman are also able to serve three-dimensional people as opposed to more generic caricatures that we might see in comic adaptations. Even the performances by non-Umbrella-Academy characters are fantastic. Britton and Blige are completely entertaining and engaging as time-hopping assassins Hazel and Cha-Cha.

It would be fair to be nervous about this series. After all, the books don’t seem like the easiest material to adapt, especially in the era of good-guy-fights-bad-guy-in-giant-CGI-battle that we see so much in comic book movies today. But thankfully, Netflix gathered the right cast, the right production design, the right writers and launched at the right time for this series to be something new and refreshing. It’s a character-driven family drama about superheroes in a sea of action-driven epics, and that makes it a tremendously satisfying watch that hooks you from the start and keeps you engaged through the end credits of the final episode. Can’t wait to see what they do with season two.