The Tick returns to fight the Terror
NEW YORK — The jocular leading men of Amazon’s “The Tick” aren’t content to just play superheroes: They want to be them.
“My dream power would definitely be invisibility,” says Griffin Newman, in the true spirit of his reticent main character Arthur Everest.
“I’d appreciate that downtime and my name would be Don’t Text Me. ‘Let me just be invisible here in the corner.’”
“I’d be the Incredible Hulk,” offers Peter Serafinowicz, who stars in the genial title role. “I would turn green and huge, but be called Superman and have a machine gun.”
Although that last suggestion is a copyright minefield, for now you can see the duo in “The Tick” (first six of 12 episodes streaming Friday on Amazon, before the second half arrives early next year), a smallscreen adaptation of Ben Edlund’s satirical ’80s comic-book series. The show picks up with Arthur (Newman), a nerdy accountant who warily teams with buglike masked crusader the Tick (Serafinowicz) to fight the Terror (Jackie Earle Haley), an ancient supervillain long thought dead.
The series follows a ’90s animated show and short-lived 2001 sitcom starring Patrick Warburton based on the comics, which a then-12-year-old Newman read and watched obsessively.
“As a kid, I was always attracted to anything that called out tropes or had a self-aware bent to it,” Newman says. “The Tick was this superhero property that was able to have its cake and eat it, too. It wasn’t just a parody of superheroes — it also is cool and has characters you care about.”
Serafinowicz was unfamiliar with the blue avenger before signing on and was initially skeptical, given that networks and streaming platforms are saturated with superhero shows: Netflix alone has six (including Marvel’s most recent “The Defenders”), while ABC (“Inhumans”), Fox (“The Gifted”) and Hulu (“Runaways”) all have genre entries coming this fall.
“I think I misunderstood what it was,” Serafinowicz says. “I thought it was a more straightforward, far less sophisticated parody. Then once I read the script, I thought, ‘Wow, this is special.’”
The half-hour comedy hinges on the yin-yang dynamic between the neurotic Arthur and endearingly clueless Tick, who persuades the former to become his sidekick, Mothman. Tick goofily sends up familiar elements of superhero stories, pausing mid-blows to critique his nemeses’ fighting techniques and giving Arthur nonsensical but straight-faced speeches about greatness (“When destiny speaks, she speaks to me. She says ‘Hi,’ by the way!”)
But unlike previous adaptations, the show also delves into Arthur’s troubled backstory, touching on his struggles with severe mental illness, his reliance on his empathetic sister, Dot (Valorie Curry), and the emotional scars he carries from watching his father die in a crash caused by the Terror.
“We’re so used to seeing a hero’s journey, and the classic refusal of the call, coming from a guy who looks like Ryan Reynolds and has clearly been working out with a trainer for two years. And you’re just like, ‘Why is this guy doubting himself ?’” Newman says. But Arthur “is a guy who’s had the deck stacked against him his entire life, and I think the show is him both learning to accept what he is capable of doing and also having to convince everyone around him that he’s not crazy.”
Both actors did some stunt and fight training before donning their anthropodic suits, while Serafinowicz refrained from watching any of the prior iterations in order to develop his own mannerisms. Unintentionally, Tick’s silly baritone may have been inspired by a certain cellphone game.
“I started to notice that the guy in Candy Crush who says ‘Sugar crush!’ and ‘Delicious!’ was not far from how I sounded,” he says, laughing.