One of the frustrating things about loving television is the extent to which a small number of shows seem to suck up all of the attention—and if you love TV comedies, it’s even worse. As many have noted, a lot of TV’s most acclaimed comedy series barely even try to be funny of late.
You’d never know that we’re living in a golden age of TV comedy right now. We’re utterly blessed with shows like We Are Lady Parts, Poker Face, Star Trek: Lower Decks, Abbott Elementary, the recently-ended Letterkenny and Reservation Dogs, and the gone-too-soon Minx, Mrs. Davis, and Rutherford Falls. That list barely scratches the surface of all the good stuff coming out right now, and a lot of those shows have barely gotten any of the fanfare they deserve.
There’s one TV comedy that I love wholeheartedly and wish everybody was watching and talking about right now—and unlike most of the shows listed above, it’s still coming out. That show is called Extraordinary, and I am obsessed with it—I’ve already seen every episode at least twice. Extraordinary is one of those shows that manages to be sidesplittingly funny, and also make you care deeply about its characters. It’s up there with The Good Place in terms of great characters and fascinating worldbuilding—words I do not type lightly.
Season two of Extraordinary arrives on Hulu on Wednesday, March 6, so there’s still time to marathon the first season (it’s only eight episodes) and get caught up. Here is the trailer for season one:
Warning: minor spoilers for the first season of Extraordinary ahead…
Extraordinary takes place in a world where almost everybody has a superpower. Some people have awesome powers, like flight or super strength, but many people have powers that are simply weird or annoying. The main character, Jen, is one of the few people who hasn’t manifested a superpower, and this turns her into a second-class citizen, stuck in a dead-end job.
Jen is on a quest to unlock whatever her power turns out to be, helped by her flatmates Carrie and Kash. Carrie has the power to channel any dead person, and she mostly uses this in her job as a paralegal to bring back deceased clients so they can settle questions. Kash, meanwhile, has the ability to rewind time about fifteen minutes, and wants to be a superhero despite being utterly rubbish at it. (Because of a thing called “superhero fatigue,” I must emphasize that this is not a show about superheroes, apart from that one extremely silly subplot.)
There’s a fourth main character, whose nature I can’t spoil, since it’s a huge storyline in season one. Suffice to say that he’s my favorite character in the show, and you can glimpse him in the above trailer.
So…. I compared extraordinary to The Good Place earlier—overweening hubris!—and I stand by it. Jen, The main character, is very reminiscent of Eleanor Shellstrop: selfish, shallow, an underachiever who wants awesome things without having to work for them. Jen is on a similar path to Eleanor, I think: slowly growing a little bit more of a conscience and an awareness of other people, while also learning to live with herself.
Most shows about superpowers are inevitably about good versus evil, or how to use your powers wisely and responsibly. Extraordinary sidesteps these issues and mostly treats superpowers as an annoyance, or as a cheat code to allow people to be a little bit more self-centered and get away with stuff. The characters who are most eager to be defined by their unique abilities tend to be the least interesting otherwise, as if having a flashy superpower provides a substitute for a real personality.
If anything, this show uses the concept of having a special trait to comment on conformity: everybody is expected to have a superpower, no matter how pointless or cruddy, and society overvalues something that mostly has no real social value. Jen doesn’t want powers because she can do great things with them, she just doesn’t want to be left out and looked down upon.
And the powers, at times, are off-the-chain funny—one thing I love about Extraordinary is the way it keeps finding ridiculous new uses for superpowers. The first season finale has one of the cleverest time-loopy storylines I’ve ever seen.
When I first started watching Extraordinary, I was a tad worried that it was going to be full of cringe humor—the British really love to put self-centered people into humiliating situations. (Case in point: Fawlty Towers, a lot of Tom Sharpe’s oeuvre.) And yes, there are some very cringey scenes here and there, especially when Jen gives in to her worst impulses and winds up in a mess as a result. But this is a show that genuinely seems to like its characters, and keeps finding new sides to them rather than playing the same side over and over again. Even just over the course of one season, the four leads have evolved a lot, and Jen in particular seems to grow up a bit. I quickly found myself super invested in Jen and Carrie, in particular—and Kash is utterly lovable despite being, at times, a bit of a wanker.
Extraordinary is funny enough to make up for the total lack of funniness among most of the award-winning, celebrated comedy shows on recent TV. It’s also a constantly inventive piece of speculative fiction, that bursts with ideas. I cannot wait to see where season two takes its themes of manky empowerment and cruddy chosen family. Please give this show a chance—like I said, if you start right now, you’ll be caught up in time for season two!
This article was originally published at Happy Dancing, Charlie Jane Anders’ newsletter, available on Buttondown.
