Syfy adapts ‘Deadly Class’ comic book
We never really leave high school. At least on television. From “The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis” to “Room 222,” “Beverly Hills, 90210,” “My So-Called Life,” “Dawson’s Creek,” “Freaks and Geeks” and “Riverdale” (8 p.m., CW, TV-14), the lives of teenagers, their joys and angst, peer pressure and budding sexuality have offered fodder for TV comedies, dramas and melodramas.
And it’s not just American high school madness. Two decades ago, J.K. Rowling mined fantasies about a private academy to create the “Harry Potter” franchise.
Which brings us to the new new Syfy series “Deadly Class” (10 p.m., TV-MA). It’s basically about an academy to train assassins, a Hogwarts for psychotic killers.
Based on a comic book/graphic novel series of the same name, “Deadly” projects the pretentious, curdled, arrested-adolescent humorlessness all too common to that literary genre.
For reasons never really explained or justified, the action takes place in the 1980s. We meet the thoroughly miserable Marcus (Benjamin Wadsworth) in a cartoon flashback. He’s trudging behind his bickering parents when a suicidal homeless person throws herself off San Francisco’s Coit Tower, killing them instantly, leaving him to abusive foster parents and homelessness.
Wanted by the San Francisco police for torching his orphanage, Marcus is recruited by Master Lin (Benedict Wong), the aphorism-spouting headmaster of King’s Dominion, a splatterpunk prep school.
Just because students are being trained in the art of poison, swordplay, chokeholds and neck-breaking (by teachers including Black Flag’s Henry Rollins!) doesn’t mean they’re not as insecure, conformist, mean and vulnerable as the kids in “The Breakfast Club.”
While this is supposed to reflect some kind of 1980s counterculture, the cast of characters resembles a grab bag from a costume shop: a wannabe gangster, a flamenco-inspired Latina lovely, a brazen Billy Idol impersonator,
a sub-Dolph Lundgren Soviet stereotype and other assorted cliches.
The best thing about “Deadly Class” is its soundtrack. The comic and the series have inspired a 150-song fantasy playlist on Spotify, featuring everything from Public Enemy to X and Gary Neuman, The Cure and The Specials. Feel free to dim the lights, lock yourself in your room and brood for days!
“Deadly Class” takes a few “Mr. Robot”-like
stabs at anti-corporate conspiracy, but it’s basically just teen confusion corralled into homicidal rage. Its message seems to be, “Don’t just sit around feeling sorry for yourself; go out and kill somebody!”
At the risk of sounding like an old-fashioned fuddy-duddy, “Deadly Class” would be decidedly unhealthy if it weren’t so dumb.
Contact Kevin McDonough at kevin .tvguy@gmail.com.