Birdy
No, you read that correctly. I am reviewing all three seasons at once. No, this review is not going to be three times longer than others. Why? Because the qualities and problems have been so consistent across all three seasons that reviewing them independently is unnecessary. If the promised season 4 (which I pray to the Monitors is the last) manages to be in any way unique or different from the previous three, I will be more shocked than if characters in Titans showed consistent morals or an awareness that casual murder is a bad thing.
Mild spoilers for seasons 1-3 below.
THE GOOD
Unfortunately, this part will be rather short. There are only two consistent good things about Titans: the cast and the one confirmed good episode. Across the board, the majority of the cast of Titans are decent to excellent actors, and they are trying their hardest to inject something akin to character or pathos into these poorly written amoral blocks of wood they are forced to play. Particular credit should be given to Anna Diop as Starfire (who the internet quite unfairly criticized for the color of her skin) and Ryan Potter as Beast Boy (whose name feels more and more like a lie as the show proceeds). In both cases, the characters get badly screwed over in multiple ways by the writing of the show and the consistently poor directing choices, but they are both still trying to make their characters fun and engaging in spite of a bad script and poor direction. The only weak points in the acting are bit characters and the occasional villain who is poorly cast or acted, with particular disdain for the actor who played Scarecrow in Season 3, Vincent Kartheiser, who is not only badly miscast and poorly written and directed, but who approaches the role with such disdain and contempt that removing him would have instantly improved the worst season of Titans.
Speaking of writing, what makes me hate the awful writing in Titans even more is the other positive I can give it: namely there always seems to be one good episode every season. For season 1, it was “Doom Patrol,” a backdoor pilot for a much better series. For season 2, it was “Conner,” the single best written episode of the series which introduces an engaging version of Conner Kent that the rest of the series just proceeds to crap on. Even in Season 3, which is the worst, there is still one good episode. “Souls” is a fun dumb romp through the Underworld, following several characters from the main cast who have died. The concept is silly and the execution is cheesy, but it is at least engaging, and allows the cast members involved to express positive, heroic emotions (a true rarity in the show). However, the key element that ties together all of these disparate good episodes is that all of them have almost nothing to do with the major cast or main plot of the Titans season they’re in. At this point, all positive talk stops. Get off now if you are not in the mood for negativity.
ALL of the BAD
While I could just say that the show is boring, the writing is bad, and its cheapness really hurts it, that feels too simple an explanation, and it lacks the venom and loathing I have for this show. So let’s break down these problems by category.
- The show is consistently too cheap to fulfill its premise
I alluded earlier to the fact that Beast Boy’s superhero name feels like a lie in the context of Titans, and that is because it has become surprising at this point whenever the show finds the budget to have the character showcase his main superpower. Throughout season 1, he only turned into a tiger (and a crappy cg model of one at that). In season 2, he turned into a snake once for 10 seconds, but then the show forgot about that and had the character say “I can turn into a tiger.” In season 3, he almost NEVER turned into an animal until they had one decent transformation scene where we see him turn bit by bit into a bat Animorphs-style. However, for the most part, this rarely happens, and Garfield “Beast Boy” Logan is often just another martial artist detective character like Nightwing, Red Hood, Tim Drake, Hawk, and Dove.
The choices made regarding character’s powers all feel like concessions to a restrictive budget, instead of creative imagination in the face of limitations. Starfire shoots fire from her hands instead of her normal energy bolts, because I guess that’s cheaper and easier to do. Raven’s powers are rarely used and often involve as little special effects as possible. Most of the fight scenes focus on the non-powered melee characters, and even the characters that have powers often end up just fighting with their hands and feet. Also, despite the fact that multiple characters in Titans have been shown to be able to fly or levitate, this isn’t even suggested to be a possibility on this show. Add to this the cheap dingy alleys and abandoned buildings used as sets, along with Titans tower just being a generic apartment building in Toronto (where they film the show), and the lack of iconic imagery and costumes for many of the characters, you can’t help but feel disappointed and bored. Even the literal castle they use as a stand-in for Wayne Manor in the show manages to be dull and uninteresting.
- The writers are inconsistent and keep forgetting the things they establish
To say the writing is inconsistent in Titans probably undersells the problem. Throughout all three seasons, the writers either forget major things they’ve established or retcon them out of existence for the sake of telling the story they’re telling now. As the most obvious example of this, Starfire’s usually evil sister Blackfire is set up in season 2. At the end of the season, the grape chewing gum that is her body spits itself into a random mom’s ear, and Blackfire possesses her and then changes the woman’s form to match hers. In season 3, this fact is never acknowledged or even commented on, and a significant plot point involves her getting back to Tamaran with a spaceship, begging the question of how her grape chewing gum body got where it was in the first place.
To make matters worse, so much important backstory is only told to us and never shown, and so many world-changing events happen off screen. These changes are never explained or commented upon. Scarecrow keeps referencing how he defeated Batman before (no clue how or when) and that Oracle was the only reason he was defeated (again, it is not clear why or how this is the case, given how crappy Oracle is in this).
This isn’t entirely the writers’ fault. Since television writing is unevenly split among multiple writers, it usually falls on the showrunners to keep things consistent. As such, the majority of the blame probably falls on the show’s showrunner, Greg Walker, and the three executive producers: Akiva Goldsman, a man who should probably consider Batman and Robin (1998) to be the apex of his comic book writing career, Geoff Johns, a longtime comic book writer and show runner at DC who has written the Teen Titans before, but apparently approached this show with little to no interest, and Greg Berlanti, the mastermind of the CW’s DC shows, who has at best a limited track record of success when adapting beloved DC characters for television. This combination of creators along with the general tone of the show is why I have often nicknamed it “Zack Snyder’s CW” because it has all so much unnecessary violence, brutality, and murder in a show that is often just moody and boring with no character or plot. I didn’t mention Greg Walker much because the man is too dull to be worth notice. He’s an executive producer and occasional writer on network TV shows. None of his work stands out enough to give me a distinct sense of who he is as a creator. I guess that fits with Titans, a show so generic and non-distinct that it is impossible to distinguish it from a stock picture of a mock up superhero show put in the frame to suggest what it is supposed to be.
- Teen Titans are not about Batman, but no one told the show runners
I didn’t think I would need to say this, but the Teen Titans and Batman are not the same thing. They have different tones, different characters, and different goals. In particular, the inclusion of Dick Grayson/Robin/Nightwing with the Titans was designed to get him out from under Batman’s shadow and allow him to be his own character. The other Titans had their own issues and stories as well and they are given equal, if not more weight, to the Bat characters. They worked together well, and their camaraderie combined to make them all better characters that deserved to stand alongside the Justice League as heroes. This dynamic in Marv Wolfman and George Pérez’s New Teen Titans is what made the group a DC cornerstone.
The show Titans seems to have no interest in that. Even though the first season should be about Raven and her problems with her demon father and the cult that is after her, the story focuses on Dick Grayson being forced to be a superhero again, rather than an ineffectual cop. Starfire’s whole plot is convenient amnesia, and Beast Boy is stuck trying to be heroic when the series has no interest in heroes being heroic. Donna Troy’s Wonder Girl comes in late in season 1, but her whole story is “I don’t really want to help people because it never works out” (a message the show reinforces by having her die unceremoniously because a carnival attraction fell on her and electrocuted her to death). As for the final two members, Hawk and Dove, their actors are good, but are hamstrung by some of the worst writing of the show. I will have more to say on them in another section.
Season 3 is the worst in this respect for multiple reasons. First, its central villain is Scarecrow (who is both the worst villain on Titans so far but also the worst version of the character imaginable), who is a poorly acted annoying villain but also never feels like any sort of threat to this level of super-powered hero team. Second, it moves the team to Gotham, which, considering the entire point of the Teen Titans (both in DC comics and in the show) was to get Dick Grayson away from Gotham and Batman, seems like a very boneheaded move. Third, the series doubles down on its goal of making Nightwing be their stand-in for Batman, by making Batman do terrible things that he would never do and the main characters constantly blaming Batman for all of the problems in Gotham and the plot, without ever showing us any of this, while also showing Dick Grayson and his Titans engaging in behavior that no version of Batman except for maybe the infamous Frank Miller All Star Batman and Robin version would approve of. By the end, when they expect us to believe that the moment where Bruce tells Jason he beat the Joker to death with a crowbar is supposed to be a heartwarming scene, I left the room to do some yoga breathing and avoid an aneurysm.
- The Titans show is all about Nightwing, and he is the worst
If you watch Titans, you would be forgiven for thinking that the characters that aren’t Dick Grayson/Nightwing or one of the Bat family members do not matter as much. Also, if the goal of making Dick Grayson the main character was to make him the best, most likable character, they failed miserably. Dick Grayson as portrayed in Titans is stupid, incompetent, cruel, and incapable of asking for or accepting help from his teammates. In fact, the core storyline of Titans across all three seasons is that they can’t succeed as individuals, and thus they have to come together as a team, but they hate each other, which makes it hard. Then they do come together for an episode or two until the series contrives a new reason for them to hate each other or split up, just to come back together again for an episode or two until they inevitably break up. It’s like the plot is in a “Will they? Won’t they?” romantic comedy plot with itself.
Dick Grayson is the worst offender of this, since he has gone to unbelievable, ludicrous extremes to avoid accepting help or growing as a person, or relearning this lesson for the fifth time. Of course, he and the rest of the series blame Batman for this problem, but since the series rarely shows us reasons to believe the narrative that they are painting for us, it soon becomes impossible to take them at their word, and you just begin to think that the show is trying to blame its poor writing on a convenient straw man scapegoat.
The overt focus on Dick Grayson also means that the rest of the Titans get shuffled off into subplots that are never resolved or are simply ejected from the season for long stretches. Poor Raven is not in the first 9 episodes of season 3, and she’s barely in the last four. Starfire’s subplot with her sister takes up the entire season, but feels pointless because the writers utterly refuse to create any sort of conflict between two sisters with different ideologies and goals, simply deciding to shrug and throw up their hands and eject Blackfire from the series. Beast Boy arguably gets it the worst, since he’s never had any follow up on any of his character development or relationship building, and often just seems to exist to be a verbal or literal punching bag for the other boring characters. It seemed like the writers might have learned their lesson by killing off or removing some of the characters from the main cast, but then they write hints indicating they can be brought back. If you aren’t doing anything with them anyway, excise them. This show is boring and cluttered as it is.
- Morals and Positive Behavior are hard for the Titans
I haven’t mentioned Hawk and Dove much yet, despite them being consistent main cast members since season 1. That is because I hate them. They are poorly characterized, and they also embody, alongside Dick Grayson, the idea that the show feels no need to suggest that heroes should model moral or positive behaviors for the audience.
I have lost count of the number of overt murders that each member of the Titans has committed over the course of the series, but the worst body counts belong to Dove and Nightwing. For reference, Dove, from the pair Hawk and Dove, is supposed to represent peace and positivity. In this show, she’s turned her cape into a flurry of razor blades and actively undermines law and order by committing crimes, stealing stuff, engaging in gross bodily harm, and then justifying it all as necessary until she suddenly decides that morals matter, at which point she exits the show without even a hint that she will be punished for her crimes.
As for Dick, not only does he murder people and commit gross violent acts of torture and maiming, he also encourages other people to murder. Let me emphasize, Batman killed the Joker because Dick told him Jason’s death was his fault, and he needed to fix it. The writers will of course argue that he didn’t mean Bruce should kill, but considering the amount of murders Dick commits, and that the series never even mentions the fact that Bruce committed murder of man in custody in cold blood, makes these excuses seem a little rich.
This dichotomy happens all the time. The heroes will talk about moral behavior and doing the right thing, but then keep murdering people, stealing things, and deciding that it just isn’t worth it to care about other people or their lives. Barbara Gordon, who succeeded her father as Chief of Gotham PD, keeps being a judgmental creep and getting on her moral high horse despite the show establishing in the flashbacks that she used to rob places just to “keep her dad on his toes,” and, I guess, to have the relationship between her and Dick Grayson mirror the relationship between Batman and Catwoman for no apparent reason. Tim Drake is arguably the only character who seems to actually want to fight crime and save people, but that’s probably because the show has decided to turn him into its equivalent of The Watcher, since he has seemingly been present at every major important moment in and knows every secret of the lives of each of the Titans. No, I am not kidding.
- Titans seasons ALL have terrible, unsatisfying climaxes
In many ways, the final note a show or movie chooses to go out on can be a blessing or a curse. A bad ending can ruin an otherwise good show or movie, and a good ending can ease the anger at an otherwise horrible project. Lucky for us, Titans endings are always the worst part of the show.
Season 1 can be somewhat excused for its bad ending, because it is now widely known that WB cut the last episode from the season when they weren’t sure if it would be renewed, and when it was they just pasted to episode 1 of season 2. While that is dumb, it is at least an explanation. Seasons 2 and 3 don’t have that excuse. Every season, the constant dithering plot, lack of focus, and endless unresolved subplots mean the season finale will always be unsatisfying, boring, and unearned. Two’s finale was bad, because it set up three important plot points to resolve and resolved each in 5 minutes apiece, leaving nothing but more useless whinging and stupid carnival fun show death for the remaining 30 minutes. Season 3 resolves all its plot points largely by just ignoring everything that had been set up prior, meaning you actively feel insulted for watching the previous 9 hours of content.
I suppose that is as good a place to end this as any. Titans is a complete and utter waste. It’s cheap. It’s poorly written. It’s boring. It insults some of my favorite DC characters ever. An occasional good episode and some unintentional comedy moments does not save this show from being one of the worst things I’ve ever watched, and Dead refuses to stop subjecting us to it until Warner Bros. agrees to stop making it. It won’t get better. If it hasn’t changed course after three seasons, it apparently feels no need to change. Avoid at all costs.
Add comment