TELEVISION
Race-forward sensibility and its older protagonist give superhero show its spark
Race is integral rather than incidental in superhero series ‘Black Lightning’.
What stands out about Black Lightning are not the scenes in which the title hero zaps a gajillion volts of justice through a crew of murderminded gang members. You can already see that sort of thing on CW — home to The Flash, Supergirl, DC’s Legends of Tomorrow and Arrow — and the rest of superhero-supersaturated TV. What you don’t see so often on this youth-oriented network is what happens after. Jefferson Pierce (Cress Williams), the hero’s middle-aged alter ego, lies in bed, sore and moaning from the exertion. “Black Lightning is getting too old for these streets,” he says.
The other distinctive part of the show is, of course, the Black in the title. Black Lightning is immersively, not incidentally, black: The good guys and bad guys, teachers and students, victims and criminals and reporters are mainly African-American.
Luke Cage and Marvel’s Runaways have diversified the comics-TV lineup. ( Black Panther arrives in cinemas in February.) But this show’s race-forward sensibility and its older protagonist, conflicted about getting back into the game, give Black Lightning its spark.
The series was developed by Salim Akil, who produces with his wife, Mara Brock Akil; the two have worked together on Girlfriends, The Game and Being Mary Jane. Producers also include Greg Berlanti, of CW’s other comics franchises, but this show has a different sensibility. It’s pulpy entertainment with a sense of purpose.
Most superhero series, for instance, begin with young protagonists discovering their powers. Black Lightning, airing Tuesdays, is the reluctant comeback story of a hero grappling with heroism’s limits.
By day, Jefferson is a high school principal, something of a local hero for his outreach to troubled students. Until nine years ago, though, he patrolled the fictional city of Freeland, wearing a space-age electro-suit that one observer likens to a Parliament-Funkadelic outfit.
Targeted by the police for vigilantism, he wearily gave it up. But he’s drawn back in as the city is overrun by a brutal gang, the One Hundred, which ends up threatening his two daughters: Anissa (Nafessa Williams) and Jennifer (China Anne McClain).
In the first two episodes, Black Lightning is suffused with the ideas of Black Lives Matter, though it comes at them from an angle. The pilot, for instance, involves street protests, not against police brutality but against gang violence. But the parallel images are unmistakable, as is the use of smartphone video by ordinary citizens, in both episodes, as a means of fighting back.
In a key early scene, Jefferson is driving and arguing with Anissa, whom he just bailed out after her arrest at a protest. He quotes the Rev Dr Martin Luther King Jr: “Returning violence for violence multiplies violence.” She answers with Fannie Lou Hamer: “I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired.”
Suddenly, they’re pulled over by police officers — one of them white — who suspect Jefferson in a liquor-store robbery, though he’s in a suit and driving a Volvo wagon. For a moment, his eyes flare with the glow of his suppressed power, but he reins it in.
The superhero who must hide his nature from the authorities is old hat in comics. So are arguments over vigilantism and the limits of nonviolence. But the context of Black Lightning is everything. Here, the image — a powerful black man quelling his emotion and struggling to present as calm, smaller, nonthreatening — has the strength of parable.
The weakest part of the show so far is the actual superheroism. The One Hundred’s members are thinly sketched, and they make paltry competition for an armoured superguy who shoots lightning from his fingertips.
Their leader is a more intriguing, ruthless presence: Tobias Whale (Marvin Jones III, who raps under the name Krondon), an African-American with albinism who denigrates other black people as “darkies.”
But the arch-villain gets little screen time early on. Williams has to carry most of the story. Fortunately, he’s up to it, inhabiting his character’s strength, his burden and his sense of humour in a series that’s picked an opportune moment to strike.