X-Men "Gifted" TV show discussion and speculation

[niconico00]

The only thing that really surprised me was how long it took for the word to drop. Show's showrunner and writers made a lot of easily avoided mistakes, ignored multiple warnings, and existing Marvel bias against Lorna meant it would've been an uphill battle to keep the show going post-merger even if it was the best show ever made.

What do you mean?

[Uncanny X-Man]

The cancellation announcement had to be expected. I had grown rather fond of most of the characters, although The Gifted was far from an exceptional show... I hope we can at least get an insight as to what season 2's ending meant and where they were planning to take the show in season 3. But at this stage I'm quite ready for a full-on reboot of everything X.

[Heroine Addict]

... horribly forced acting (Warpath aside). ...

You mean Thunderbird/John Proudstar, his younger brother Warpath/James Proudstar, never appeared on the show.

Gifted is not a part of the X-Men film series and Disney co-produced the show.

You are correct, by the same team (Marvel TV/Jeph Loeb/et al.) responsible for AoS, Inhumans, the former (soon-to-be, for the last few) NetfliX 'Defenders' properties, Runaways, Cloak & Dagger, and Hulu's upcoming multiple, animated 'Offenders' mature content series. In that sense, along with Legion, it's the only live action X-related property that is/was.

That said, if it were to be picked up for a season 3 by a streaming service--and that's a BIG IF, 'cause I personally think it's still quite the long shot, at best--it would likely be as the Deadline article mentions:

... a fairly objective POV, on things:

‘The Gifted’ Canceled By Fox After 2 Seasons; Marvel Drama Could Potentially Find New Home At Disney - Deadline

... I hear that there have been no real conversations but there is a chance for The Gifted to find a new home within the Disney family. The show is produced by Marvel Television, which currently has series on Disney-owned Freeform and Disney-controlled Hulu. (Disney+’s Marvel series come from the company’s movie division.)...

I mean, that's where ALL the other Marvel TV produced product I listed is, eXcept for the NetfliX stuff... so there's precedent. Not to mention, both Gifted & Legion are already there, as well.

When it comes to the MCU thing, probably wouldn't hurt to keep in mind those few, WTF?! final moments, from Gifted S2's last episode.

Regarding...

... its second season scoring even higher on Rotten Tomatoes (85% vs. 74% for Season 1.)...

... believe that stems from aggregated critics' reviews:

https://www.rottentomatoes.com/tv/the_gifted/s01
https://www.rottentomatoes.com/tv/the_gifted/s02

... not member votes. Though with both, there is/was a noticeable, sizable disparity in count, between the 1st & 2nd seasons. But the consensus on quality was really about the same for each, so any difference there, is pretty much minute & therefore negligible. And I would add, for what it's worth, with all that anyway.

[Heroine Addict]

What do you mean?

Like with more than a few segments of certain fandoms, a concocted persecution compleX-cum-pity party, IMO. Apathy =/= malicious intent.

... at this stage I'm quite ready for a full-on reboot of everything X.

With Legion already announced as concluding, Gifted now being officially cancelled by its broadcast network, DizMar's current & arguably tepid promotion of the pushed back twice Dark PhoeniX (along with it being touted as the FoX-Men verse's final film installment), AND New Mutants AGAIN said to be further delayed (perhaps never to see the light of day... in theaters, at least)... I think that's a safe bet. EVENTUALLY, tho... gotta give it time, it's gonna take a while.

[paulojrmam]

I wonder if we might get something X-related in the MCU in a TV show before a movie, since apparently movies will still take so long.

[Uncanny X-Man]

I wonder if we might get something X-related in the MCU in a TV show before a movie, since apparently movies will still take so long.

I think that might be tricky because it would mean you'd have to cast a character years before a director is on board. I guess we'll find out in the Summer whether we really have to wait 5 years for the first X-Men MCU movie - I believe once Far from Home hits, Marvel will reveal their slate for the next few years.

I think plans can be changed if a property like X-Men becomes available - although 5 years is not a very long time in Hollywood time to be fair. I wasn't expecting anything before 3 myself.

[salarta]

What do you mean?

Most of this is a big messy ball of things I've seen over the past decade.

The worst and most obvious of it. Brevoort over on the Avengers books went out of his way to try to erase and replace Lorna from the Magnus family. This included removing her from an existing Magnus family portrait in Children's Crusade, excluding her from family scenes in Avengers vs X-Men and Axis, trying to replace Lorna with Luminous for Wanda and Pietro on Uncanny Avengers post-Axis, and having Enchantress' hair tinted green (and Wanda's red) on an Axis variant cover while All-New X-Factor #14 that actually had Lorna and Wanda interacting was about to come out (with THAT cover withheld until Friday before release). Lorna's exclusion from Axis is doubly damning because that storyline used Genosha, and Lorna's role and history with it was big enough that she should've been involved. More recently, there was Lorna in forced limbo for 2 years (end of 2015 to end of 2017), then promoting her "big return" on X-Men Blue only to have Havok hijack it and make Lorna's depiction all about promoting Havok and Magneto, followed by Havok getting his own team book to lead while Lorna got nothing til Uncanny X-Men.

There are a lot of less obvious pieces though, that people tend to dismiss because individually they seem like nitpicking. It's only when looked at in the whole picture that they're issues. Lorna was left off the X-Men 50th anniversary amalgam covers while Havok got to be on them with four of the O5. Marvel never promoted her origin story finally being told in X-Factor #243, or leading a team with All-New X-Factor. Lorna went without a new action figure for over a decade, despite being on several top 10 most wanted lists for several years (the person who announced this even specifically said "you can finally take her off your top 10 lists"), until the X-Men Legends figure finally happened. Things of that nature.

That's not saying Marvel's done nothing good for her in that time. They did give her her origin story (over 40 years after she was created), let her lead a team (same), gave her her first playable appearance in a video game in 2012/2013, finally gave her more than a cameo role in an X-Men event with Uncanny X-Men (over a decade after last time that happened). The problem as I see it, though, is that most of what I just pointed out was stuff Marvel should've done a long time ago and they were simply catching up. Of course they deserve some kudos for finally doing it, but it's kinda like a school expecting to be applauded for desegregation in 2013. Sure it's progress, but it's progress that was long overdue.


Some other fans tend to look at Marvel and everything it does with an overly optimistic POV. So they're a bit more eager to dismiss red flags, e.g. the ones that led to Gifted's cancellation. And to be fair, optimism isn't bad. It can lead to a lot of good things, including a shot of morale for fans who aren't up for calling out biases and demanding better.

But I've been following along for 10 years now. My introduction to Lorna was me having to find out about her on my own by pure luck, then watching as the Wolverine and the X-Men cartoon and Jeff Parker's Exiles volume 2 (with prominent roles for their versions of Lorna) both got abruptly canceled while Lorna was stuck in space limbo for over a year. When I say abruptly, I mean WatXM had plans out to season 3 and some work done for season 2, and Jeff Parker had some of a script for issue #7 done. And no, they weren't canceled because Lorna was on them, but those cancellations certainly didn't help my view of Marvel or speak well of their opinions of her worth.

I entered with my optimism immediately crushed by reality. Whereas I think some fans entered at a time when all they saw were the good bits, not the work that went into pushing for Marvel to make those good bits happen instead of throwing her into limbo and forgetting about her. And honestly, I hope they don't have to go through their optimism getting crushed. But that's in Marvel's court.

[Theleviathan]

Using RT scores that had 75% less contribution as a quality gauge is.....silly. The show bled viewers - that's all the gauge you need. The second season was a mess. They had no idea what story they wanted to tell and it resulted in a character mangling disaster.

The only reason RT's scores were consistent is blind loyalists stuck with the show and wanted it to be better than it was. This thread is a monument to the gymnastics people tried to spin this shows quality, ditto RT and the nerd site reviewers.

By the end it was a bad show with some good elements. It won't be saved. It shouldn't be either.

[Soulsword323]

Disappointed, but not shocked. Regardless of what happens, I really enjoyed both seasons, and I'm thankful for Dumont's Polaris. I would love if it got to finish up on Hulu, but I'm not getting my hopes too high.

[salarta]

Using RT scores that had 75% less contribution as a quality gauge is.....silly. The show bled viewers - that's all the gauge you need. The second season was a mess. They had no idea what story they wanted to tell and it resulted in a character mangling disaster.

The only reason RT's scores were consistent is blind loyalists stuck with the show and wanted it to be better than it was. This thread is a monument to the gymnastics people tried to spin this shows quality, ditto RT and the nerd site reviewers.

By the end it was a bad show with some good elements. It won't be saved. It shouldn't be either.

A little commentary on my part about ratings.

Most of my experience in this regard comes from video games. In that experience, I've seen a HUGE disparity between critic ratings, sometimes even user ratings, and what people actually think about it. Metroid: Other M has a metascore of 79 on Metacritic, listed as "generally favorable," yet the majority of people HATED it for its depiction of Samus Aran. The fallout was intense enough that Nintendo basically blacklisted Metroid and Samus beyond minor roles like Smash for 6-7 years, and got more insulting with Federation Force before finally caving and starting to try to learn from their mistakes. Yet if you went only by the critic ratings, you'd think Other M was great. Same trend happened with 3rd Birthday (Metascore 71 for mixed/average), Soul Calibur V (Metascore 81), various other games.

There's also been a movement for video game sites toward doing away with scores entirely, just giving their impressions and leaving it at that. Quantifying impressions has a tendency to give the wrong impression, and sometimes even results in complaints and attacks on video game sites for their reviews. The high scores for games like Other M and 3rd Birthday were often because they considered gameplay to be the primary thing to judge and either disregarded the script or tried to be "objective" in its judgment. But a game that takes its star action hero female protag and has her ask permission from a man to use her own weapons, or piles the character with persistent sexual harassment, or replaces most of its female roster with new characters cause the existing ones are "too old" to fight (while the men somehow aren't) has issues that really shouldn't be treated like a minor quibble. And sales for all three games I mentioned reflected that.


I'm not saying Gifted was like those examples, by the way. My point was only to highlight how critic ratings often don't reflect reality, using some very clear-cut examples outside of Gifted.

[jmc247]

Goodbye to the cast, crew and those that worked their ass off to try to make the show a success and that is all I have to say about that.

Kudos to Emma Dumont in particular for rising the quality of the entire show greatly with your acting no matter the dialogue and best travels on your future endeavors.

The show was at its best and made for some of the best viewing on TV when it knew the story it wanted to tell, had consistent characterizations and didn’t talk down to the audience.

[Theleviathan]

I'm not saying Gifted was like those examples, by the way. My point was only to highlight how critic ratings often don't reflect reality, using some very clear-cut examples outside of Gifted.

I like your post. When it comes to geeky shows I prefer reviews from non-geeky sites. Ditto video games.

There is too much incentive for them to be positive over obhective. A show's quality can be hard to judge by any one measure, but hemorrhaging viewers would seem to be a pretty sound one to conclude the quality dipped.

[salarta]

I like your post. When it comes to geeky shows I prefer reviews from non-geeky sites. Ditto video games.

There is too much incentive for them to be positive over obhective. A show's quality can be hard to judge by any one measure, but hemorrhaging viewers would seem to be a pretty sound one to conclude the quality dipped.

Thanks!

I'm not quite comfortable saying losing viewers by itself is a sound way of saying quality dipped because I feel all sorts of other factors can play a part too. One I've seen with the Charmed reboot is constant breaks for 1-3 weeks. It's had like 3-4 cases of this happening, and I know it has to be killing viewer numbers because I missed a new episode once and I'm loving the show more than anything else I'm watching.

[Heroine Addict]

Plenty of not so great entertainment has been successful, just as many fair to decent productions have not been.

As difficult as divergent opinions are to accept sometimes, particularly the more passionate you feel about yours, that they'll always be there is the only thing factual about them (regardless of their source). That's why words like objective & subjective, will always apply to our individual thoughts on things. Passing judgement based on conclusions drawn from actualities or otherwise, cannot provide certainty, only possibility. Perceptions & perspectives unique unto oneself, mindsets & senses of being, play too big a part in what we each see as reality.

... I'm thankful for Dumont's Polaris. ...

Not surprisingly, she was the absolute highlight for me. And going by impact looking back, more than a few others would agree. I'm not ashamed to admit she became & remained the #1 reason, I was so invested.

[MichelleDiMera]

Its sad..only because of all the promotion Emma did for this show. She was the life blood..the symbol of everything that was good that came from the show. Every Lorna focused show set social media ablaze...the trending was UNDENIABLE...Reeva didnt do that. The Cuckoos didnt do that. The Struckers? Lol. The goofy Purifers? Nobody gave a damn about that. More defiant Lorna is what the fanbase deserved and they got shafted. Emma actually kind of spoke against the writing almost from the beginning of the second season..its all over her Instagram but she didnt whine about it. So I think she should be commended no matter how this ended.