As if The Nevers didn’t have enough problems – and this ramshackle Steampunk-action-supernatural series has plenty – it arrives under a cloud. Joss Whedon, revered for the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, created this HBO show and was its original showrunner. But partway through the season’s production, he left after a public accusation, later echoed by many actors, that he had fostered a work environment of emotional abuse from the Buffy days in the 1990s through to the 2017 film Justice League.
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How much should those problems matter to viewers? Not as much as in some cases, because television, unlike movies, has a long-term escape route. Filmgoers who might want to boycott Woody Allen, Roman Polanski or any other auteur have a simpler choice, in or out. Television can often eliminate any toxicity and keep moving. Roseanne was fired from her hit ABC comedy in 2018 after a racist tweet, but her character was killed off, the show was renamed The Conners and kept thriving. On The Nevers, Whedon was replaced as showrunner by Philippa Goslett (screenwriter of Mary Magdalene), who carried on with the swarm of writers and directors already involved. Whedon’s personal issues are now too well-known to ignore, but they can stay off screen.
But on screen, things don’t get much better for him. The Nevers is clunky and self-important, a period piece set in 1899 London about people with special powers who are social outcasts. Three years earlier, a cataclysmic event – seen but not explained at the end of episode one – left some Londoners, mostly women, with various supernatural gifts. These people become known as the Touched, a term with the derogatory whiff of insanity.
At the centre of the series is the prickly, terse Amalia True (Laura Donnelly), whose gift is to see glimpses of the future. The allegorically named Mrs True runs an orphanage for the Touched of all ages, including a girl 10ft tall, a woman who can turn objects into glass, and a doctor who can heal wounds by passing his hands over them.
Amalia’s friend and sidekick Penance Adair (Ann Skelly) is her opposite, light-hearted and sweet. Like some proto-Q from the Bond movies, she invents gizmos in her lab in the orphanage’s basement. Her robot drives a horse-drawn carriage. A three-wheeled motor car shoots out of that carriage, racing along the narrow, and conspicuously fake, city streets.
Whedon remains the primary creator of episodes one to four (the only ones available to preview), which finished shooting while he was showrunner. It’s easy to see his fingerprints in the idea of people with supernatural powers engaged in a struggle between good and evil, sometimes a moral fight and sometimes punching and kicking. Let’s not forget that Whedon also directed a couple of Avengers movies. When Amalia rescues a Touched girl who suddenly speaks a mishmash of foreign languages, she fights off the child’s would-be kidnappers. In another life, Amalia could have been a Mixed Martial Arts fighter.
The action and quirky settings are sometimes engaging, taking us backstage at the opera, where Amalia chases a murderous Touched woman named Maladie, and outside to a park where an assassin hides in the bushes. Almost everything else is either lame or overwrought. The attempts at humour are painful. Penance tells Amalia, “You look very fine today,” and Amalia says, “I think so too.”
The show repeatedly thwacks us over the head with the idea that the Touched are society’s disenfranchised, stand-ins for groups discriminated against today. Lavinia Bidlow (Olivia Williams), the orphanage’s rich benefactor, is in a wheelchair, and makes a point of saying that her own situation allows her to understand what it’s like to be marginalised. Amalia’s conversational gambits include, “Being Touched is not a defect of character.” The British Empire itself is threatened by the existence of the Touched women, as we hear when Lord Massen (Pip Torrens) spells it out at a meeting of government advisors fearful of losing their patriarchal power. “What women are appalled by today they will accept tomorrow and demand the day after that – and the immigrant and the deviant.”
These characters are not wrong but they are tiresome. For decades critics have analysed Buffy, delving beneath its energetic surface for sociological meaning. But one thing that show never did was take itself too seriously. The Nevers won’t stop announcing its social message, with characters including a closeted gay man threatened with blackmail and an Indian woman who points to her own skin when someone mentions discrimination.
There are many other, unaccountable moving parts. James Norton is Hugo Swann, an upper-class sybarite fond of Oscar Wilde-ish aphorisms, who runs an underground sex club he is trying to turn into a profitable business. Apparently life isn’t always easy for those Victorian second sons. Norton carries off the louche character with casual charm, but Swann does little more than add a dash of period colour.
Goslett tweaked the first episodes in post-production, and took over episodes five and six, which Whedon had finished shooting. Six more episodes are in the works, but shooting hasn’t even begun. There’s still time to fix this mess. Good luck with that.
★★☆☆☆
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