Powers

Powers gives you the slam-bang super-hero action you want, as well as the hard-boiled tone many cop shows aim for and seldom attain.

Instead of gratuitous thrills, the creatives--also including Remi Aubuchon (“Caprica”) and Michael Dinner (“Justified”)--emphasize story, with enough twists and turns in each episode to keep the target audience hooked.

Powers doesn't get off to the the best start but the concept is strong and the world so detailed and cleverly built out that it's probably a series that bears some monitoring to see if it will improve.

[The cast] all do their best to provide what every comic-book adaptation needs and so few achieve, which is a little soul, some human substance at the core. Powers shows occasional, fitful signs of that kind of life, though in the long run it may be just too threadbare to get there.

Powers needs focus, and it needs to understand what works and what doesn’t for their characters. The series has done a better job of juggling its characters and themes this season, but it still can’t come close to what we’ve been seeing with Marvel’s Netflix foray or CW’s The Flash.

Powers will be sure to appeal to hard-core gamers, but it's not likely to attract a wider audience. The dialogue, for one thing, is likely to rub serious drama fans the wrong way with its mix of cheap one-liners, bad metaphors, and a stunning amount of epithets and four-letter words--anatomical, sexual, scatological, it's all there.

The actors have no chemistry together and their characters lack the kind of depth and texture that a well-crafted TV project would have been able to give them. Various actors frequently have to deliver painful exposition dumps, the storytelling is often incoherent.