The Umbrella Academy Review

The casting is the strength. Aidan Gallagher plays a fifty year old assassin in the body of a thirteen year old and is the best thing in every season he is given room in, Robert Sheehan's addicted medium is a genuinely committed comic performance, and Elliot Page and Tom Hopper anchor the family scenes. The house style, all Wes Anderson symmetry, dance sequences to sixties pop and a very funny pair of masked killers in the first season, gives it a personality that the increasingly complicated plotting cannot dislodge.

The trouble is repetition. Every season ends with the world about to end, the siblings scattered through time, and a reset that undoes the emotional progress of the previous run, so nobody grows. The rules of the time travel change whenever the plot needs them to, and the villain economy is thin, with each new commission or organisation less interesting than the last. The final season, condensed to six episodes, discards several years of setup and lands on an ending that satisfies almost nobody.