USA TODAY International Edition
RAINING ON SUPERHERO STATUS QUO
‘Umbrella Academy’ unfolds a saga of a special dysfunctional family
As lead singer of rock band My Chemical Romance, Gerard Way enjoyed sold-out arenas and screaming teenage throngs, but nothing can compare with seeing his quirky comic-book clan come to life and dance to a Tiffany jam in Netflix’s “The Umbrella Academy” (streaming Friday).
“My wife had asked me what it was like, and it’s a mixture of excitement and strangeness and it’s very weird. Like, it never stops being surreal,” says Way, whose Dark Horse comic with artist Gabriel Ba has become the streaming service’s new must-binge superhero show.
But the usual do-gooder tropes are blown up, doomsday style, in the 10-episode first season of “Umbrella,” which executive producer Steve Blackman (“Fargo”) describes as “a dysfunctional family show with a body count.” He wanted something subversive, with flawed characters out of a Wes Anderson film and absurdism a la the Coen brothers. “The goal was to make this as cinematic as possible.”
The “Umbrella” mythology begins in October 1989, with the inexplicable birth, on the same day, of 43 children to previously unpregnant mothers all over the world. Eccentric monocled industrialist Sir Reginald Hargreeves (Colm Feore) adopts seven of them and, as the children exhibit extraordinary abilities, he forms a crime-fighting squad of kids in domino masks.
Years later, their father’s death is the setting for a reunion of the nowestranged siblings: hulking leader Luther (Tom Hopper), who has been stationed on the moon for four years; A-list celebrity mom and Luther’s unrequited love Allison (Emmy Raver-Lampman); hotheaded Diego (David Castaneda), who had stuck with being a vigilante; drug addict Klaus (Robert Sheehan), who sees dead people; and Vanya (Ellen Page), a quiet violinist and outsider, because she never had superpowers. (She also wrote a tell-all book about the family.)
Their long-lost time-traveling sibling Number Five (Aidan Gallagher), a middle-aged man in the body of a 12-year-old, shows up in spectacular fashion to inform them they have eight days to prevent the apocalypse. And in hot pursuit are a pair of assassins named Hazel (Cameron Britton) and Cha-Cha (Mary J. Blige).
Hopper compares the Umbrella Academy to “a world-famous children’s pop group, like a One Direction or Jackson 5. All their life has been work and performing a job. They never got the time to go, ‘Yeah, but who am I? What do I want to do?’ You don’t get a childhood,” he says.
Hopper has wanted to play a superhero, more for “the human being underneath” than the powers. “It’s amazing that they have super strength and can fly and do supercool stuff, but what (burden) comes with that?”
Yet the “normal” sister also has issues after growing up in an abusive household and being ostracized by family members. “Vanya struggles with depression, anxiety, feelings of worthlessness and barely even knows how to have a personal relationship, let alone an intimate relationship,” Page says.
Superhero movies and TV have changed over the last decade, but are still hung up on origins, devoting time “with somebody realizing they’ve got superpowers, and processing that. In this show, you get that in the first five minutes,” says Way. “We have this saying with ‘Umbrella Academy’ the comic: You only do the good stuff.”