Critical Condition: Titans

Titans | Netflix, from Friday

☆☆☆☆ “The high-powered team behind the show — the Oscar-winning screenwriter Akiva Goldsman, the uber-producer Greg Berlanti and the DC veteran Geoff Johns, a one-time Teen Titans writer — is aiming for the superhero version of kitchen-sink realism rather than comic-book gloss. Like Netflix’s Marvel series and Mr. Berlanti’s DC series for the CW network, Titans borrows from police procedurals, action thrillers and teenage dramas, but it goes greyer, quieter and more psychological.” — New York Times.

☆☆☆☆ “Titans is a superhero hybrid — a live-action series that essentially weds the CW’s DC Comics-inspired fare with the gritty, premium-cable approach of Marvel’s Netflix dramas. That’s not a bad formula, and it yields an entertaining, heavily serialised show.” — CNN. 

☆☆☆☆ “DC Universe’s first original show features superheroes swearing and experiencing erectile dysfunction, but it’s trying so desperately to seem edgy that it doesn’t have time to be entertaining.”  — The Hollywood Reporter.

☆☆☆☆ “Titans [is] the sort of overwrought, ultraviolent, grim and gritty tale that took over Batman comics in particular and the comic book industry as a whole in the late Eighties and early Nineties … Great stories can be told in this mold, and have been. But a bit of the old ultraviolence doesn’t in and of itself make something good, or even cool.” — Rolling Stone.

☆☆☆☆ “A fast-paced and action-packed series that will draw any supernerd worth his or her salt in … While these are all characters we know and love, Titans doesn’t set out to tell their origin stories in a way we’ve heard a thousand times before. The whole series takes a familiar premise and twists it into something new — successfully in some cases and unsuccessfully in others.” — TV Guide.