I was looking at a list of Marvel tv series. It listed the series and gave their popularity based on what percentage of critical reviews were positive.
Ms. Marvel - 98%
Agent Carter s1 - 98%
WandaVision – 92%
Loki s1 - 92%
Hawkeye - 92%
Cloak & Dagger s1 - 89%
Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. s1 - 88%
Moon Knight - 86%
The Falcon and the Winter Soldier – 85%
Runaways s1 - 85%
Agatha All Along - 84%
She-Hulk: Attorney at Law - 80%
Ironheart - 76%
Echo - 71%
Secret Invasion - 53%
Inhumans - 11%
When you look at these numbers, Inhumans really stands out.
I’ll admit I never watched the show and I knew it wasn’t a hit. But what made it this unpopular?
I’m a long time fan of the Fantastic Four sphere of the Marvel Universe and was thrilled to see there was an Inhumans TV show. I think it was the first use of FF characters to appear in the MCU.
I watched one or two episodes and I was out. The characters didn’t look like their comic book counterparts and a dull introduction to their power sets doled out like a mediocre episode of Agents of Shield.
I think it’s always been difficult to translate the Fantastic Four (and so Inhumans) to film. They could do the special effects with AI now better than back then. And at heart, the FF was basically a family drama with, well, an overlay of ‘fantastic’ sci-fi . I remember I watched a few episods of the Inhumans and basically they decided it would be easier (and cheaper) to just cut off Medusa’s long prehensile tresses! Boy, that was a stupid decision! I can see their thinking when doing so, but Medusa without her hair is - well, WHY?
It was impossible to do right on a TV budget. They cut Medusa’s hair so they wouldn’t have to CGI it. The scale of the Inhumans story just won’t work on the budget they had. Or maybe it could with better writing to get around it. The show had neither. I probably would have kept watching anyway.
Yup, they pretty much tried to half ass what should have been a premium TV show and it showed. It wasn’t as terrible as the ratings suggest, but it wasn’t good either.
There was a lot of behind-the-scenes BS that occurred during production as well. Then-Marvel CEO Ike Perlmutter wanted an Inhumans movie because they did not have filming rights to the X-Men. He wanted to phase out X-Men because of this and make Inhumans happen. Marvel Studios president Kevin Fiege was not interested in making a film about them and dropped it from the lineup, so Perlmutter put it in the Marvel Television division.
Per Google, they only had 10 months for production, hired a “budget-first” showrunner, and made a number of cost-cutting script decisions, like cutting Medusa’s hair, as mentioned above.
I’m going to be the contrarian–not saying the show was good… It was REALLY bad… but it wasn’t bad for budget…it was telling a mediocre and problematic story really poorly. Which I think is more on the rushed production timeline. The show was dull, the budget just made it feel even duller.
It’s not like the show was adapting a successful and beloved corner of the MU…And yes, every character is somone’s favorite character, etc. BUT…the problem with the Inhumans is the Inhumans. They have never really worked on their own without relying heavily on the rest of MU to make it interesting. Even their most interesting story in the last 20 years had to move them central to cosmic Marvel (which was very popular at the time) and relied on tie-ins with the X-men.
And knowing Perlmutter’s personal politics–the plot of an oppressed underclass rising up to depose an aristocracy who is obssessed with pure genetics…being the VILLAINS, makes the story a bit of a problem.
What struck me first was the quality of the acting (… or should I say “Lack of”?).
I had just watched a friend’s daughter in a high school play, and those kids were much more convincing than the “Inhumanes”.
At the time, I wondered whether they’d had enough time to learn their lines and blocking, that’s how bad the show was.
.
And then came The Eternals, also an embarrassment for Marvel (I notice that it’s not on the OP’s list… is it like Highlander ][ , where for many people, it doesn’t exist?).
I watched the first two episodes of Inhumans, and never felt engaged with it.
It probably doesn’t help that the leader of the group, Black Bolt, is effectively mute. I only just now discovered that he was played by Anson Mount, whom I love in Star Trek Strange New Worlds; between one of the main characters having no dialogue at all, and Medusa’s powers being nerfed (I also didn’t care for Serinda Swan’s performance), it was just a trudge to watch, and I gave up.
The thing is, they managed to integrate a different version of Inhumans - successfully, IMHO - into the series Agents of SHIELD which was running at the same time, and made no effort to connect the two shows. It was weird. The entire second and third seasons of the show centered around Inhumans, as sort of an off-brand (yet appealing) X-Men. And now you had another show about different Inhumans?
I do remember from Agents of Shield that the MCU was trying to replace the X-Men with the Inhumans, even though the two groups had separate histories and identities in the comic books.
Absolutely. But, Disney/Marvel had no rights to the X-Men and their related titles back then, due to the old contract that Fox had for that property, which dated back to before Marvel Studios.
So, the Inhumans were the closest thing to “mutants” that they had rights to use in TV/film.
Very much agreed. “We interrupt this story of a power struggle between mutants in a secret civilization on the moon for” < checks notes > “a pointless story about people growing weed in Hawai’i”.
The Fantastic Four was my favorite comic book when I was growing up. But The Inhumans always seemed to be background characters. Aside from Medusa (who was introduced a long time before the rest of the Inhumans) and Crystal (who was Johnny Storm’s girlfriend and a stand-in member of the FF when Sue was pregnant), none of the others got a lot of “Air time”. Heck, most of the didn’t even have names for a long time. The idea of making these nonentities the stars of a series doesn’t seem a likely proposition. Black Bolt didn’t even speak, fer cryin’ out loud. Maximus was interesting, as a villain. He was perpetually trying to take over. And he was Mad (it was right there in his name). Gorgon’s name always bothered me – he wasn’t a Gorgon (and they already had a Medusa), he was a goat-legged dynamic kicker. Karnak was a sort guy with a big head who broke things. Triton was a cut-rate Prince Namor. Lockjaw was arguably the coolest of them all, and he was big dumb bulldog who bit things and teleported.
Not sure if this is a whoosh, but Gorgon was his actual name…not a superhero moniker. Also, Stan and Jack were going for the original etymology which just means grim faced.
