Mike Carey’s Lucifer is a great comic book. Fox’s TV adaptation has nothing in common with it.
The initial trailers for the show made this realization impossible to ignore. It’s the devil! But he’s a COP. And he says things like “Let’s go to pound town.” And he’s going to rip the veneer off this crazy world we call Los Angeles! Despite the presence of Lux, Mazikeen, and Amenadiel, it was clear that Fox’s Lucifer was going to be an entirely new thing.
Still, there was always a possibility that Fox was using the goo in their Tired Tropes Bucket to drizzle over a big reveal proving that the show really does embrace the arcane weirdness of the comic. The comic doesn’t really hold back on otherworldly oddity, and that might be a little much for a casual viewer. In that respect, re-framing Lucifer as a cop procedural might be the show runners’ way of building a bridge between a new viewer and the mind-expanding concepts that the Lucifer comic features.
This is not the case. Fox’s Lucifer is just a cop procedural featuring a guy who can get anyone to confess at any time. And it is ever so boring.
Visual adaptations of books don’t have to be exact and, in fact, they shouldn’t, because an element that shines in one medium can be disruptive in another. A book’s internal monologue becomes awkward if translated directly into a TV show as voice-over, for example. An adaptation can take even greater liberties with the source material, as long as it continues to explore the themes and questions that the original material raised. (Captain America: Civil War seems a prime example of this. As do the Batman movies.) Lucifer didn’t have to reproduce the comic to still evoke that comic. And while the core premise from the book is still in the show–Lucifer has quit Hell and now has nothing to define him–the tone of the show is so lowbrow and predictable that a viewer becomes actively discouraged from thinking about the larger implications of Lucifer quitting Hell. All that’s left is a generic cop/L.A. show.
Fans of the comic won’t find anything here to interest them, but ultimately there’s nothing to sustain non-comic viewers, as well. Tom Ellis, playing the titular character, is a very charismatic actor and at times you wonder if he’s subtly auditioning for a role as the next Doctor in Doctor Who. (Although sometimes he comes off like Kilgrave from Jessica Jones and yeeeeiiiikes let’s not go there, show.) He is ready to entertain you, to make you love Lucifer, and he’s so good that he almost…almost…overpowers the hour’s worth of empty dialogue he’s given. This would be a very different show if the dialogue were legitimately snappy, but it’s not. Every line sounds phoned in and expository, designed to move to the next plot point without revealing more about the character speaking. Shouldn’t Lucifer himself, as a mythological figure, be a baffling mystery, with one eye on you and the other on the universe at large? He should say things that don’t really connect with the conversation, he should reach conclusions years ahead of everyone else. Instead, he’s just weary and aggressively sexual. He’s the guy at parties who thinks he’s funny but is really just…empty. And whether you’re familiar with the comic or not, that emptiness can’t sustain the show.
Which is troubling, because Lucifer’s character is the only one sustaining the pilot episode. His foil, Lauren German’s Detective I’m Taking This Job Seriously, is so boring that the show disconnects her from Lucifer’s plotline not once, not twice, but three times. Lesley Ann-Brandt’s Mazikeen exists for about two seconds and has no impact on the episode. And D.B. Woodside’s menacing angel Amenadiel is painful. I personally have a big soft spot for Woodside and his amazing voice, but all he does here is stand in weird places and repeatedly tell Lucifer that he has to go back to Hell. Amenadiel’s threats carry no weight whatsoever, and while this is also true of Amenadiel’s presence in the comic book, there it’s played for laughs while on the TV show we’re supposed to take it Very Seriously. This means that Tom Ellis’ Lucifer has to carry the entire show, and while Ellis himself is up to the task, the show itself isn’t.
Essentially, everyone interested in or involved with Lucifer deserves better. Which is…such a weird thing to find one’s self saying.
Chris Lough writes about fantasy and superheroes and things for Tor.com. Leah wanted him to title this review “God. Awful.”
Ah. Well, probably for the best that I was babysitting last night.
I dunno, I thought it was an entertaining show and am looking forward to next week. I am more than a little bit worried that making it a police procedural will get old very fast, but I was more than entertained enough to give them a chance.
Mind you, I never read the Lucifer comic, just the Sandman issues it sprang from.
I thought this was a lot of fun. Not very deep, but fun. The leads are effective and entertaining, and the dialogue was very witty. And I like the idea that the Devil could be tempted by goodness and humanity. It’s kind of an inversion of the usual idea, and an intriguingly optimistic notion. I’m sure plenty of religious types will get up in arms about the premise of this show, but the idea that even Lucifer could be redeemed strikes me as very Christian.
As for the procedural aspects, I’ve noticed over the years that shows with unconventional premises tend to start out conforming to a conventional procedural/case-of-the-week format to look safe enough for the network suits and investors and mainstream audiences who like procedurals, and then they gradually start to work in the more weird and daring ideas and move beyond the procedural stuff and eventually fully embrace what they wanted to be in the first place. Examples include Dollhouse and Person of Interest and quite a few others. Even Orphan Black started out making itself look like it would be a cop show, before soundly abandoning the procedural facade about four episodes in. So just because the first episode of a show feels like a conventional procedural, that doesn’t mean the creators intend it to stay that way. That’s just the protective camouflage to get the show on the air.
Of course, it can be risky if you take too long to move past the case-of-the-week stuff. CBS’s Threshold got a reputation as a formulaic COTW series after a few episodes, and it was cancelled just before the really intense, formula-shattering, serialized episodes kicked in. Same with the 2007 Flash Gordon, which tried too hard to imitate Smallville early on and tell mostly Earthbound stories. It later abandoned that and became a much better show, but by then it had already lost its audience.
It bugs me that Neil Gaiman doesn’t get a creator credit on this. I mean, sure, technically he didn’t create the character of Lucifer, but he did create the version this is based on.
It was awful. Not knowing that it was based on a book, I had no expectations, but the premise from the previews looked good.
I need more Tom Ellis, but not this.
@3: It was in there, it was just in the closing credits rather than the opening ones. I’d have to go back and check the exact wording, but all 3 of the comics creators were acknowledged.
@5/LazerWulf: Even so, end-credits billing means less financial compensation for the creator than opening-credits billing. And does it actually say “Based on the comic created by” so-and-so, which would earn the creator some money, or is it one of those “Special Thanks” credits that are essentially just a courtesy?
I actually liked this a lot. I never read the comic maybe that has something to do with it but i thought this has a lot of potential. I liked the characters and the style it was done in the super effects were not in your face and there was no posing or slow motion fighting like all other comic adapted TV shows feel compelled to put in regardless of being DC or Marvel. It was entertaining and i will definitely be tuning in for episode 2. Tom Ellis was exceptionally good at being the devil.
The pilots main job is groundwork and it set the pace and introduced the characters and i think it accomplished that well,
it had a lot of expectation riding on the pilot with overly zealous religious people petitioning for it to be cancelled before it ever got chance to run and a lot of people who are disappointed that it’s not the comic which i sympathize with but i think it is going well.
@6/CLB: “Based on the Characters created for Vertigo by Neil Gaiman, Sam Keith and Mike Dringinberg”
Thanks for making me not feel bad about deciding to give this show a miss. I read the comics and going from the mythological to a police procedural just felt wrong. Being a cop show only just managed to work for Forever, let alone an adaptation of Lucifer.
I kinda liked it for about the first half or so. Then of course he had to be a police procedural. And even that, if it was just a first ep where he works with the cops, to set up the premise if him being the devil alive, and then expanded beyond that to tackle some bigger questions, it might have been worth it. But I think it’s just going to be week after week of him solving crimes using his powers and the occasional angel or demon popping up, and that’s not a show worth watching to me.
Also, I never read the comic, but I have read the wiki, and I was kind of hoping they’d go with “He makes it a point to never lie” like they said there… unfortunately, he did lie a couple times, even if it seems to be a broad trend, him telling exactly the truth and people just not believing him.
@10/ghostly1: Like I said, a ton of shows these days start out being procedurals for the first couple of months because procedurals are the big thing these days, but then they grow beyond that format over time. I tend to think that the first half-dozen episodes or so are made for the benefit of the network suits and the advertisers, convincing them that it’s safe enough to spend money on, and it’s only afterward that the episodes start being made just for the audience’s benefit and start to be more daring. You can find a lot of very different, very odd or innovative shows that all started out looking like conventional procedurals, because that’s what networks and mainstream audiences are comfortable with, and you have to ease them into the weirder stuff that genre fans would prefer to see from the start. So it helps for genre fans to be patient and give a new show a chance. There’s no guarantee a new show won’t be just a conventional procedural, but a lot of really interesting ones start out looking like they will be.
Sadly, I just watched the pilot and the review seems to pretty much sum it all up. I’m a big fan of the comic, and have read it multiple times (the last time just before Christmas). This is nothing like the book, both in material, or how the characters are designed.
Is it just me, or with a little tweaking and some more engaging dialogue, this could have been a really good first episode of Hellblazer? Can we just do a swapsies?
Oh, and the one thing that ruined it for me? The flinch at the end. Really? Lucifer would NEVER flinch. Especially not from that. This is the MORNING STAR we’re talking about here. Yeesh.
@12/Scott: “Is it just me, or with a little tweaking and some more engaging dialogue, this could have been a really good first episode of Hellblazer? Can we just do a swapsies?”
We had a Constantine series just last year on NBC, with John Constantine then showing up on Arrow earlier this season. So it’s a liiiiittle early to reboot the character, I’d say.
@11: Orphan Black I never got the sense of being intended to be a procedural, the plot just happened to involve cops at first while she was trying to live her clone’s life for the cash. Dollhouse was a ‘case of the week’ at first but at least it was something DIFFERENT than YET ANOTHER COP/NON-COP TEAM-UP (and the show got much better when it did break out of that). I haven’t seen many cases of the police-type procedurals which change dramatically… even Person of Interest, as far as I’ve seen, although it may have introduced some groundbreaking subplots… still, for years, more or less followed the episodic format of the first couple episodes, just with other stuff going on in the background.
At least, from what I’ve heard from others and occasional peek-ins. I admit I could be wrong about that, because… I gave up PoI after three episodes. And I never went back. It bored the hell out of me. Am I missing out? Maybe, but… I’ve got plenty of other things to watch. I feel no need to waste hours watching something and waiting for it to start to break out of it’s pattern, maybe. Seems like it plays right into the hands of the people who use the trick. Maybe the better long term strategy for sci-fi fans is to swiftly abandon shows that look like this so the “protective camouflage” won’t be required anymore.
It wasn’t a bad show, but it was very “pretty.” I couldn’t quite tell the difference between the show and the beer commercials.
@15/ghostly1: Sure, but making Beth a cop made it look like it fit the procedural mold, and that was the lure for the general audience that likes that sort of thing and the suits who want their shows to fit popular formulas. Cop shows are the big thing now, so it helps to make your show look like a cop show. Same thing as with Westerns back in the ’60s. Westerns were as big then as procedurals are now. You want to do a show like Kung Fu that’s about martial arts and Asian philosophy? Okay, so long as you make it a Western. You want to do a show about a spaceship exploring strange new worlds? Pitch it as “Wagon Train to the stars.”
And you really should give Person of Interest another look — all four seasons are currently up on Netflix, and it’ll probably play much better on a binge watch where you can see the arc/mythology threads building more clearly. By this point, for the past year or so, they’ve largely left the case-of-the-week stuff behind in favor of their overarching story, which is as much a tale about the nascent Singularity and the emergence of strong AI as a prescient exploration of privacy invasion and the surveillance state. (A lot of real-life headlines in the past few years have eerily mirrored what PoI was doing as fiction just a year or so earlier.) It’s really a startlingly intelligent and challenging work of hard science fiction, disguised as a case-of-the-week procedural. (Although I’ll grant there were times a couple of seasons back that I got tired of the focus on the police-corruption storyline and wanted them to get back to the good stuff. But it’s definitely a show where patience pays off.)
You shouldn’t blame or penalize the showrunners themselves, because they’re trying to maneuver around the limits imposed on them by executives, advertisers, and the mainstream audiences who actually like formulaic procedurals. If you want to do something subversive, you often have to sneak it past the forces of conformity and convention. That’s something that needs to be recognized and supported if we want such subversions to have a chance of making a difference in the long run.
If we just walk away from genre shows that start out having a procedural bent, that won’t convince the suits that procedurals won’t work, because the whole reason things are done this way is because procedurals do work — because most mainstream viewers eat up the formulaic, repetitive case-of-the-week stuff. All it will do is convince the suits that SF and fantasy and eccentric concepts don’t work and they need to do more conventional, unchallenging procedurals. Because Hollywood suits have a long history of learning the wrong lessons from failure. (For instance, assuming that the failure of Catwoman and Elektra meant that audiences didn’t like female-led superhero movies, rather than simply that audiences don’t like bad movies.)
I found the show to be entertaining. My wife and I both agreed on this, but we also agreed that while the pilot/premiere episode was entertaining, it remains to be seen if that is sustainable. It will take much better than average writing, and several as yet unrevealed serial plotlines to keep a show like that on the air. If it becomes “damned of the week” it will die a fairly quick ratings death.
Your reaction to the show mirrors mine. It was pretty awful. The dialogue was cliche and lacked any real cleverness. The supporting actors bored me to tears. As someone who loves the source material, I expected so much more. I fail to understand how the showrunners managed to squash every ounce of potential within the show. I honestly can’t imagine the show running longer than one season.
Less than impressed. Has TV writing become so fill-in-the-blank? I mean how many shows have we teamed up a guy with a female cop. The writers keep looking for different angles to make the guy ‘interesting’, we have the smart guys like in Lie to Me, Elementary and the Mentalist, we have the goofy guy like Castle, we have the crazy guy like Perception, and we have the pseudo-immortal in Forever. Now we get another Mad-Lib cop procedural where the guy is the Devil. Oh yes, page two requires the guy to have issues!
Not impressed and probably won’t watch again
@@@@@ #20
Don’t forget Sleepy Hollow. Although I like it, Ichabod falls into the “pseudo-immortal” and “smart guys” category of procedural team-ups which include a female.
I run into this a lot when people criticize things.
They judge it against some personal ideal, or the artistry of the genre, or other similar shows.
When I watch something, I enter it openly and wait for one thing to happen: entertainment.
And I have to say, Lucifer entertained me. I wasn’t bored. I chuckled a few times. Even my wife laughed and that is no mean feat.
Was the show perfect? No. Was I looking for another police procedural? No. Was the dialogue unique and clever? Not so much.
But I wasn’t watching the clock. I was having fun. That’s all I expect from my TV and movies.
@17: You shouldn’t blame or penalize the showrunners themselves, because they’re trying to maneuver around the limits imposed on them by executives, advertisers, and the mainstream audiences who actually like formulaic procedurals.
It’s impossible to distinguish between the showrunners who do this because they’re trying to sneak something past these hypothetical executives and ones who do it because they believe that it’s a really good idea, and encouraging them just encourages more of this behavior.
Might they learn the wrong lesson if we abandon them? Maybe. But I doubt they’ll give up on SF entirely for any length of time, it’s too big an influence on pop culture. And I’d rather they learn the wrong lesson from an honest rejection of the knee-jerk application of a trend I don’t like than learn the wrong lesson from me trying to play long-distance mindgames.
I’m not even 100% against procedurals, or sci-fi procedurals. I quite enjoy iZombie, for instance, because it’s enjoyable on its own merits. If Scalzi’s “Lock-In” ever makes it to series, I’d probably enjoy that, if it does a good job with casting and writing. And there are even a few procedural shows that have no SF elements that I watch. I will not support a middling show that latches on to a tired formula, to it’s detriment, in the hopes that, in a few seasons, maybe it’ll try to sneak something a little smarter through. When I see “… and teams up with the cops to fight crime!” attached to an otherwise decent premise, it instantly turns me off, and it had better be pretty great to turn me around.
I thought it wasn’t that bad, it had its moments, though I agree that it seemed a bit generic. What puzzles me, though, is what is the point of adapting a comic book into a TV series if you’re practically going to change everything? The guy doesn’t look like the character, doesn’t act like the character, and the show’s plot is not the same as the source material. Hell, the only thing that’s the same is the fact that he quit his job as Hell’s ruler (but for different reasons) and that he owns a night club called Lux where the bartender is one of his demon former top lieutenants (who has another name and look, too). If Hellblazer tanked, this has no hope whatsoever.
@23/ghostly1: “It’s impossible to distinguish between the showrunners who do this because they’re trying to sneak something past these hypothetical executives and ones who do it because they believe that it’s a really good idea, and encouraging them just encourages more of this behavior.”
If it’s impossible to tell the difference, isn’t it better to err in the more generous direction? Innocent until proven guilty is a basic principle of morality and fairness. If you assume the best about someone else and you’re wrong, that’s on them. You gave them a fair chance and they let you down. But if you assume the worst about them and you’re wrong, then you’re the one at fault, because then you’re penalizing them for something they didn’t do. You’re arguing that we should punish the innocent along with the guilty, and that’s a terrible way to treat people. It also tends to backfire against yourself, because then you just sabotage people whose efforts could benefit you.
And “hypothetical executives?” Where does that come from? Are you unconvinced that network executives exist? Do you imagine that the permission and funding for television shows just falls from the sky, or that showrunners get their programming notes by praying to idols? Executives are the least hypothetical part of the whole process. They’re the overriding constant, the ones whose decisions determine what gets made in the first place and how it gets made. Everything that showrunners do has to be approved by the executives who are paying for the show. And since it’s their money and their careers at stake, the execs generally like to play it safe and need to be persuaded to take chances.
“I will not support a middling show that latches on to a tired formula, to it’s detriment, in the hopes that, in a few seasons, maybe it’ll try to sneak something a little smarter through.”
It usually doesn’t take that long. As I think I said above, in my experience it tends to take about a half-dozen episodes, give or take, before a show starts to grow out of its initial sell-the-series phase and stretch itself creatively.
I haven’t read the comics so I found the comments about the other characters interesting. Thanks! I enjoyed it; it was fun and intelligent–not the run-of-the-mill police procedural. I hope it doesn’t become boring…
@23: “If it’s impossible to tell the difference, isn’t it better to err in the more generous direction? Innocent until proven guilty is a basic principle of morality and fairness.”
In the spirit of that, would you like to invest your life savings with me? I promise I’m very good with money and will not only give you a great return, but do so in ways that benefit the world as a whole as well. You can trust me. And if you don’t think you can, isn’t it better to err in the more generous direction anyway?
In court, “innocent until proven guilty” is a good policy. In everyday life, it’s okay to be a little fuzzier, especially when it’s your own time, money, energy, life on the line, or when you have to choose to ‘spend’ these on one of several options. I don’t owe them the hours of my life I’d have to spend waiting for them to, maybe, get good. There are plenty of other shows I don’t watch that might, someday, get really good, I’m not punishing them, either, I just have no interest in it and will not support it (not that my support actually matters, except indirectly in that I won’t be posting positively about it and potentially influencing others… as far as TV ratings are concerned, I’m completely invisible).
Besides which the “innocent until proven guilty” concept doesn’t even apply here, because either way they’re “guilty” of something… if they really think a police procedural teamup is the best way to do the show, then they’re guilty of that poor taste. If they don’t and are just trying to deceive people who wouldn’t otherwise watch into watching the show they want to do, then they’re guilty of that, and taking a good concept and ruining it in the hopes they’d later be allowed to fix it, rather than finding another concept that would have worked better and that they connected to on it’s own merits. I’d rather believe they’re deliberately producing something they want to do, even if it’s something I hate, and to me, that’s the more generous interpretation, even if I’ll reject the results of it.
“And “hypothetical executives?” Where does that come from? Are you unconvinced that network executives exist?”
Unless you’d like to name a specific executive who wouldn’t let this concept through unless they put it in a police procedural mold, that executive you’re blaming the format on remains hypothetical to me, compared to the people who are actually behind the show. Executives as a whole are not hypothetical, but when you start giving them definitive characteristics and attribute specific actions to them, either you can point to them or they’re hypothetical.
“It usually doesn’t take that long. As I think I said above, in my experience it tends to take about a half-dozen episodes, give or take, before a show starts to grow out of its initial sell-the-series phase and stretch itself creatively.”
And in my experience, most don’t (at least, not very much) for a long time, if ever, and those that do, you tend to get a sense for it pretty early on. I don’t get that sense here. I get the sense they’re going to ride the format to cancellation (with perhaps a few unrelated subplots that aren’t worth suffering through the procedural elements to get) and get by on the charm and chemistry of the leads. Tell you what, if I hear it gets narratively awesome within the next dozen episodes, I’ll take another look. If it ditches the procedural premise entirely before the end of the season, I’ll perhaps suffer through those first few episodes to see how it got there. Until then, well, I might have it on if nothing else is on that time slot, I’m not sure of the rest of the current schedule for the channels I get (the fact that I can’t even recall what was on in that timeslot before suggests that I’ll have no trouble finding something else though)… but I’m not going out of my way to see it.
I enjoyed the pilot, even though I think they’ve bowdlerized Lucifer something awful. (That said, I’ve only read the Sandman version of the character, and am unfamiliar with the Lucifer comic.)
Tom Ellis shines in the part. He is the redeeming factor. Everyone else seems beige and bland in comparison, or perhaps they would seem that way anyway. I also have misgivings about the premise, which won’t hold up well if there is nothing more to it than this COTW thing. That said, pilots are, for all that they are intended to sell a show, often very wobbly and all over the place, trying to please too many audiences at once without doing it very well. There are a few pilots that really shine, but also a lot that don’t.
I also agree with Christopher Bennett that you should give a new show a few episodes before you give up on it, unless it really bores you to tears or outright disgusts you. I remember sticking with The Vampire Diaries when it started, even though it seemed like a very generic Twilight clone, and then suddenly after episode six or seven it suddenly left the ground and became my favourite guilty pleasure, and some time after that I didn’t even feel guilty anymore. :) It looked exactly as in the discussion above, that the showrunners were pleasing the executives for a while until they were satisfied and looked away, and then chuckled evilly to themselves and broke out the illicit fireworks. :)
So, you know, that’s what I’m hoping for: That there are planned goodies along the way, kept in store for when the executives look away. The problem, I think, will be in keeping people’s attention until then (if there is a then). If it tries too hard to be a generic crowd-pleaser, it will fall short.
I usually give a show three or four eps if I’m undecided. If it hasn’t caught me by then, either because of characters, plot or writing (or all three), it will be pure luck if it keeps my attention. If you really have limited free time on your hands, I get it if you want to be more particular and weed out the dross as quickly as possible, but the truth is that you can’t always tell from the pilot.