With New Mutants, Deadpool 2, and X-Men: Dark Phoenix dominating headlines left, right, and center, you’d be forgiven for letting The Gifted slip off your radar.
After the rather excellent Legion, it’s the latest small-screen X-Men drama to come out of Fox, and we know that Bryan Singer and Matt Nix’s family-oriented series will stage its premiere on Monday, October 2nd. That’s not too far off now and in case you haven’t been keeping up, the Marvel drama largely centres on a family comprised of two vanilla parents – played here by Stephen Moyer and Amy Acker – who find their lives upended upon discovering that their two children, Lauren (Natalie Alyn Lind) and Andy (Percy Hynes White), have been imbued with mind-bending mutant abilities. Co-existence has never been easy, and after years spent exploring the taut relationship between humans and mutant on the big screen, it’ll be fascinating to watch that strife unfold through long-form storytelling.
From the moment Fox’s X-Men TV series was first announced, however, the creative forces behind the family-centric drama have gone on record time and time again to clarify that, yes, the show will follow in the footsteps of Legion and blaze its own path later this year. It’ll still have its roots in Fox’s grand X-Men universe, of course, but we understand The Gifted will carve out its own corner on the admittedly convoluted timeline. Don’t expect any direct ties to the mutant movieverse, then – not yet, anyway.
So, does that mean the X-Men won’t factor into things at all? Not quite. Going on record to clarify the situation, creator Matt Nix said the following in a recent interview with Variety.
“In our world, one of the things we’ll be unpacking is the specific relationship of this group of characters to the X-Men. It’s in the trailer that the X-Men are gone. And that’s not a dodge, like ‘The X-Men are gone and we’re never going to mention them again!’ We’re going to be exploring it. It’s a huge deal to these guys. It’s a huge deal in the world. It’s one of the central mysteries of the show.”
Doesn’t get much more direct than that, right? Some fans took the fact that the X-Men are gone to mean that they’d be simply dismissed in the show, but according to Nix, that couldn’t be farther from the truth. And while it remains to be seen how the series will ultimately connect to the wider universe, it’s nice to know that the absence of the beloved mutants will be a big deal in the show and won’t be something that’s just sidestepped and briefly touched on.
Starring Amy Acker, Stephen Moyer, Sean Teale, Jamie Chung, Coby, Emma Dumont, Blair Redford and John Proudstar, The Gifted airs on Monday, October 2nd.
