Marvel's Runaways - Season 1 Review

In their latest effort to branch out their broad-appeal multi-billion dollar franchise, Marvel has teamed-up with America site Hulu to present Runaways, a new television series based upon the fairly recent and popular Marvel comic book series. Blending teen drama with superheroes seems like a potential recipe for success in terms of popularity, and given how acclaimed Buffy the Vampire Slayer was with blending teen drama with horror, it seems like a natural follow-on from that.

It's just such a shame that Marvel's Runaways is so sloooooooooooow...

This first season is divided into ten, roughly hour-long episodes, but most of this time is dedicated to building up mysteries and creating as much character drama as possible. One of the series' main characters disappears for the last two episodes and no one seems to care because all of the other main characters (and believe me, there's a lot) are spending so much time arguing and debating amongst themselves. Very little in terms of actual narrative progression occurs over the ten episodes, which is odd given that the first five or six episodes actually develop a solid introduction for the show. It's as though the writers have been told to structure the story around six potential seasons or something, so are delaying lots of reveals and pay-offs throughout this season and into the next few.

Even when the first season ends, it feels like it's barely begun, setting up a plot that we won't get to see play out until next season, when really this should've happened before now. In fact, this could have been a 13-episode season that covers the whole story with better pacing and still maintain an element of the teen drama that makes the show a unique superhero series. The series' main villain (played by Fantastic 4 and Fantastic 4: Rise of the Silver Surfer's Dr Doom) is horribly underdeveloped, a character saved for later no doubt. The actor is fine, don't get me wrong, but the character is a nebulous entity that the writers have no clear idea how to handle. Part of me wonders if they'd only read so much of the Runaways comics before they started making the show, and have therefore been delaying the pay-offs that they don't know about yet.

Is it all bad? No, of course it isn't. The teen drama never quite balances with the superhero elements, but the show is confide nt enough to throw in magic, sci-fi technology, alien(?) technology and a pet Veloceraptor, so it's hardly afraid of its comic book roots. Runaways is clearly being made by talented people both in front of and behind the camera, and that talent shows through on screen. The raptor puppet is very impressive, even if the CG model betrays the illusion at certain moments. The cinematography is very striking and different to other Marvel entries, favouring a high contrast, high saturation look that makes a lot of the images quite striking and eye-catching. The score by Siddhartha Kholsa is a wonderful synth-based soundtrack to the whole thing that's worth listening to on its own, again standing out against more generic orchestral superhero scores.

Marvel's Runaways: season 1 is either too long or too short, but either way the pacing over the course of the series is far too slow and inconsistent. The series may ascend to great heights next year with a second, more stable outing, but this first entry was a slight disappointment in my eyes. The talent and creativity is there, it just needs a more solid structure to play with.