The Tick has landed in all his blue rubbery splendor on Amazon Video.
(Seriously, what is his suit made of?)
Today the pilot episode of The Tick became available to stream on Amazon Video and it is the superhero satire we’ve been waiting for.
The Tick first graced the small screen as an animated series in 1994 and ran for a total of 36 episodes spanning two seasons. Then in 2001, The Tick was rebooted as a live action series starring Patrick Warburton as the title character. Despite being later deemed a cult classic, the live action series only lasted for one season consisting of 9 episodes.
It only took 15 years, but now The Tick has returned.
Back in March Amazon announced they would be rebooting the series with Peter Serafinowicz would be starring as the blue crime-fighting arachnid. Then earlier this month Amazon released a first look at the series that left us ready for the premiere.
And now it’s here!
The reboot of The Tick takes the term “dark comedy” to heart. The series opens on Arthur Everest (Griffin Newman) who is struggling with an obsessive personality due to the traumatic death of his father. (Which they recap using appropriately corny special effects.) But when The Tick swoops in, or technically lands I guess, to save the day, you realize the person he’s probably really going to save is Arthur.
As reported by Variety, in a press release creator Ben Edlund said, “Visually and thematically this new Tick lives in the textures and rhetoric of today’s superhero saturation tsunami — and for it to be something you want to watch for hours, it needed to find its way to a story with heart and stakes, as well as absurdism.”
If the pilot is any indication, the show accomplishes what Edlund set out to do. In a world that is filled with multiple superhero film and TV franchises, The Tick is the series we need. Obviously it’s a show that can’t take itself too seriously since the title character is named after a blood-sucking arachnid, but the pilot manages to balance humor, heart, and action. The pilot gives us heroes we can love but who also mock the concept of superheroes.
As explicitly stated in The Tick and Arthur’s exchange, Arthur is the brains and The Tick is everything else. The show promises dark humor as well as a buddy comedy. Additionally, The Tick and Moth are not the heroes their world needs but the ones we need.
The pilot episode of the reboot is available to stream on Amazon Video.