Some characters aren’t terrible, such as Copley’s new partner Deena Pilgrim (Susan Heyward), but even the good ones get saddled with over-written dialogue that doesn’t have the ebb-and-flow of normal conversations, eliciting more of an unrealistic business-like tone even in casual moments. Characters remember things out of the blue to move the plot forward, point out things no one in real life would point out, and never really spark off of one another. Copley, as good an actor he is, defaults to his gruff-guy mode (a sin I thought we all understood never to touch again thanks to Elysium), which robs him of his immense charm.
Not helping to dispel the vacuous image plaguing the pilot is the costuming of the show’s various “powers,” especially a gang of young kids who meet up to presumably show off their abilities, despite the apparent illegality of doing so. Their look is so laughable – like what a late nineties Disney Channel Original Movie’s idea for superheroes from the future would be, think Zenon meets Up, Up, and Away – as to immensely distract from anything happening on screen. I’m not one to ever quibble over such minor details, but when a show so massively misfires in such a critical department – a superhero series’ superhero costumes – it’s far easier to appreciate those that do it right (Arrow and The Flash, for instance).
There’s not much else to say about Powers, because there’s not much else that happens in the pilot. Hints at an overarching season villain are given, but choppily, and the pilot’s main storyline at first appears to be the murder of a fellow power, shifts to a mysterious girl, and somehow ends up with an all-nude Eddie Izzard getting a lobotomy.
It’s a fractious, schizophrenic show as unreliable in its entertainment value – characters okay with cursing tiptoe around the fact that blow jobs apparently grant superpowers, a lone interesting conceit yet again barred behind schoolyard mentalities – as the Powers Department appears to be in actually capturing bad guys. It wants to be a self-referential homage to the superhero genre and deconstruct its tropes in the process, but never in its pilot does it show any proof that it has the brawn, or brain, to do so. If this is someone’s idea of what gamers want for entertainment, the already-vocal subset of the population may finally have a right to flame up message boards.
