In the pilot episode of Amazon’s “The Tick,” the titular superhero declares, via voiceover, that “villainy is real. It has guns and scars and tattoos and it’s licensed to drive.” That about sums up his philosophy on superheroing: EVIL is out there, and one must fight that EVIL.
It’s no surprise, then, that he can’t wrap his head around the concept that someone might not want to fight evil with him. It is, after all, EVIL. And yet, that’s exactly what he faces with Arthur, a neurotic, obsessive, mentally unstable accountant with a vendetta against a supervillain whom the world believes to be dead. “The Tick” is about The Tick (Peter Serafinowicz) annoying Arthur (Griffin Newman) into becoming a superhero and fighting EVIL alongside him.
Everyone in Arthur’s family thinks he’s crazy; he’s been institutionalized in the past for delusional thinking. But he isn’t really crazy. His impossibly complex calculations and detective work have led him to the right — if unlikely — conclusion: The Terror (Jackie Earle Haley) is still alive. The Terror being the supervillain who brought a spaceship full of Arthur’s favorite heroes down on Arthur’s father when he was a kid, squashing him. The world believes that The Terror has since been vanquished, but Arthur knows better.
One night, as he scopes out a local crime ring, Arthur meets The Tick. The Tick instantaneously imprints on Arthur, and refuses to leave him alone for the rest of the series. While The Tick may be super-strong and bulletproof, he has no understanding of social cues and has no idea when he’s not wanted.
Anyway, you know how this origin story goes… Arthur’s confidence grows, his circumstances change, and before you know it, it’s Arthur and The Tick vs. EVIL.
There’s a lot to love here. This is a show that lives or dies on the strength of its cast, and boy is it cast well. Griffin Newman in the central role (that is, as Arthur the sidekick) is what makes “The Tick…” tick.
Sorry about that. Let me try this again:
Griffin Newman is not giving the neurotic performance that you might expect in the role described above. Instead, Arthur’s past trauma and subsequent brushes with mental illness are apparent in everything he does (I’d like to think that the show was named for Arthur’s habitual eye-twitching instead of the titular superhero). We easily understand Arthur’s initial, instinctive rejection of the superhero mantle, that years of being told he was crazy and dysfunctional have rendered him incapable of seeing himself as anything other than a pathetic loser. It’s not nothing that Newman pulls all of this off and still manages to be very, very funny. “The Tick” was marketed around its titular character (for obvious branding reasons), but its true star and protagonist is Newman as Arthur.
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That’s not to dismiss the delightful delightful delightful *intake of breath* delightful performance that Serafinowicz is giving here. His Tick is, to put it succinctly, a dolt. A blockhead. A nincompoop. A character in the vein of other pop-culture figures who don’t understand the nuances of human communication (think Zoolander, or Drax the Destroyer), Tick is a well-meaning but moronic presence, constantly unleashing a torrent of superheroesque profundities about the nature of evil and goodness and humanity and falling (“the key to successful falling lies in realizing that you are a falling person.”)
Everything The Tick says is just one degree of nonsense off from something Christopher Nolan would unironically put in a Batman movie. Read that “falling” quote as Tom Hardy’s “Bane.” It works. The Tick’s voiceover functions essentially like the Commissioner Gordon speeches in Nolan’s Dark Knight movies — as thematic white noise. If you aren’t paying attention, it’s almost as though The Tick is being coherent. Further, The Terror is distinctly Jokery (“you don’t kill people because they call you names. You kill people because it’s fun”) and there’s even a secondary character, Overkill, that basically is Christian Bale’s Batman. “The Tick” deconstructs the Nolan school of superhero movie better than any other super-spoof because it understands that underneath the Nolan sheen, those movies are as ludicrous as “Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets” (good movie, go see it). Incidentally (or perhaps not) “The Tick” has another, more concrete connection to the Nolan Batoverse — Wally Pfister, cinematographer on all three of Nolan’s Batman flicks, directed two episodes of the series.
“The Tick” also has a very Batman-like cavalcade of supporting characters — from local convenience store owner Goat, who gets to tell Arthur “you cannot borrow a poncho. This is not a poncho library” (Arthur ends up committing “grand theft poncho,” in The Tick’s words), to Arthur’s protective sister, Dot, a doctor who spends her downtime sewing up wounded mob guys.
But it’s the show’s cast of Gotham-but-sillier villains who really light up the screen. We have local crime boss Ramses (Michael Cerveris), an Ancient Egypt-obsessive who inexplicably is always drinking Vitamin Water (this is never explained — or even mentioned — and may be my favorite gag on the show). Then there’s Overkill (Scott Speiser), though The Tick wonders aloud if the Batman analogue may be an antihero rather than a flat-out villain. There’s Miss Lint (Yara Martinez), a sympathetic, one-eyed female Electro who is infatuated with, and easily manipulated by, The Terror. And last but very much not least, we’ve got Jackie Earle Haley as The Terror.
Haley is so freaking good in this. “The Tick” has him buried under layers of makeup which make him look like an emaciated alien — as if Josh Brolin’s Thanos went on a month’s long hunger strike to protest… not having enough infinity stones, I guess? Underneath all that makeup, Haley is quite funny — completely on the show’s wavelength, it never feels as though he’s tonally confused — but genuinely scary. “The Tick” is not a show that by rights should have a genuinely scary or threatening villain — almost every other element of the show is a joke, or a riff on some superhero trope — but it does, and it works very, very well.
The Terror wears a signature headdress that intensifies his presence, but Haley makes him scary even without its assistance. Like Nolan’s Joker, it’s tough to guess what The Terror will do or say next. He just seems to get off on the chaos. Also, Haley’s line reading when it comes to The Terror expressing his thoughts on almond milk is outrageously funny.
I hinted earlier at the misdirect in Amazon’s “The Tick” marketing campaign. They’ve been presenting it as a superhero spoof about a dolty blue superhero guy named The Tick who says “tickles!” as bullets deflect off of him. Viewers may be surprised to be presented with a show about Arthur, mental illness, and childhood trauma. It’s a weird show (at one point, Whoopi Goldberg — Whoopi Goldberg, that’s right — says “people be cray-cray” to a Superman analogue); I’d honestly be surprised if it broke out into the mainstream. But then again, it does feature a dolty blue superhero guy named The Tick who says “tickles!” as bullets deflect off of him, and if we can’t all get onboard for that, perhaps Trump truly has won. [B+]
