Parents' Guide to Deadly Class

Violent and visually beautiful, this melding of Harry Potter, Suicide Squad, and X-Men comes off as less than a sum of its parts because its dramatic beats are too familiar, its point of view too basic. At this point, the idea of a school for super-powered misfits, even violent killers from criminal families, is a narrative cliché; only truly creative writing could lift it out of its been-there-done-that status. But unfortunately, that's not on offer here. The problems are crystallized in the first episode of Deadly Class, with Marcus landing himself in hot water with one of the school's violent gangs when he tries to protect a female classmate he believes to be abused by her violent boyfriend.

There's a concept in comic book fandom known as "fridging," in which female characters are abused, raped, and/or killed merely as a convenient reason for their male love interests to fight villains. Fridging turns female characters into objects, and male ones into verbs; neither are given humanity. So why start what's advertised as something cool and new with something old and tired? Surely in a school for murderers, a deadly female character could protect herself. And male characters shouldn't need a trumped-up reason to look or act heroic. With these kinds of tiresome and regressive ideas anchoring the action, no amount of thick black eyeliner, teens ultra-violencing each other, or alterna-'80s songs on the soundtrack can make this show look fresh and cool. Instead it mainly feels like a waste of good actors and art direction. P.S.: You really had to call one class the "Dark Arts"? Really? You didn't think about maybe picking another name? No one in the writers' room said, "Hey, wasn't that what Snape wanted to teach?" Shrug. Well, OK.