Doom Patrol Review

Nothing about this should work. The team is a racing driver whose brain was transplanted into a robot body, a woman with sixty four personalities who each carry a different power, a former film star who can no longer hold her own shape, and a test pilot wrapped head to foot in bandages who shares his body with a spirit of negative energy. The show treats every one of those conditions as a disability and a wound rather than a cool power, so the episodes are about agency, consent and shame far more than they are about villains.

Alan Tudyk's Mr Nobody narrates the first season from outside the frame, insulting the audience and the characters, which is the funniest thing DC has produced. Brendan Fraser and Matt Bomer do superb voice and body work, Diane Guerrero is astonishing switching personalities inside a single take, and Timothy Dalton plays a monstrous father as pure charm. It is also wildly uneven. The middle seasons wander, several arcs resolve through a magic object, and the budget shows badly whenever the plot leaves the mansion.