The Funniest TV Show You're (Probably) Not Watching
One of the frustrating things about loving television is the extent to which a small number of shows seem to suck up all of the attention — and if you love TV comedies, it's even worse. As many have noted, a lot of TV's most acclaimed comedy series barely even try to be funny of late.
You'd never know that we're living in a golden age of TV comedy right now. We're utterly blessed with shows like We Are Lady Parts, Poker Face, Star Trek: Lower Decks, Abbott Elementary, the recently-ended Letterkenny and Reservation Dogs, and the gone-too-soon Minx, Mrs. Davis, and Rutherford Falls. That list barely scratches the surface of all the good stuff coming out right now, and a lot of those shows have barely gotten any of the fanfare they deserve.
There's one TV comedy that I love wholeheartedly and wish everybody was watching and talking about right now — and unlike most of the shows listed above, it's still coming out. That show is called Extraordinary, and I am obsessed with it — I've already seen every episode at least twice. Extraordinary is one of those shows that manages to be sidesplittingly funny, and also make you care deeply about its characters. It's up there with The Good Place in terms of great characters and fascinating worldbuilding — words I do not type lightly.
Season two of Extraordinary arrives on Hulu on Weds March 6, so there's still time to binge the first season and get caught up. Here is the trailer:
Warning: minor spoilers for the first season of Extraordinary ahead...
Extraordinary takes place in a world where almost everybody has a superpower. Some people have awesome powers, like flight or super strength, but many people have powers that are simply weird or annoying. The main character, Jen, is one of the few people who hasn't manifested a superpower, and this turns her into a second-class citizen, stuck in a dead-end job.
Jen is on a quest to unlock whatever her power turns out to be, helped by her flatmates Carrie and Kash. Carrie has the power to channel any dead person, and she mostly uses this in her job as a paralegal to bring back deceased clients so they can settle questions. Kash, meanwhile, has the ability to rewind time about fifteen minutes, and wants to be a superhero despite being utterly rubbish at it. (Because of a thing called "superhero fatigue," I must emphasize that this is not a show about superheroes, apart from that one extremely silly subplot.)
There's a fourth main character, whose nature I can't spoil, since it's a huge storyline in season one. Suffice to say that he's my favorite character in the show, and you can glimpse him in the above trailer.
So.... I compared extraordinary to The Good Place earlier — overweening hubris! — and I stand by it. Jen, the main character, is very reminiscent of Eleanor Shellstrop: selfish, shallow, an underachiever who wants awesome things without having to work for them. Jen is on a similar path to Eleanor, I think: slowly growing a little bit more of a conscience and an awareness of other people, while also learning to live with herself.
Most shows about superpowers are inevitably about good versus evil, or how to use your powers wisely and responsibly. Extraordinary sidesteps these issues and mostly treats superpowers as an annoyance, or as a cheat code to allow people to be a little bit more self-centered and get away with stuff. The characters who are most eager to be defined by their unique abilities tend to be the least interesting otherwise, as if having a flashy superpower provides a substitute for a real personality.
If anything, this show uses the concept of having a special trait to comment on conformity: everybody is expected to have a superpower, no matter how pointless or cruddy, and society overvalues something that mostly has no real social value. Jen doesn't want powers because she can do great things with them, she just doesn't want to be left out and looked down upon.
And the powers, at times, are off-the-chain funny — one thing I love about Extraordinary is the way it keeps finding ridiculous new uses for superpowers. The first season finale has one of the cleverest time-loopy storylines I've ever seen.
When I first started watching Extraordinary, I was a tad worried that it was going to be full of cringe humor — the British really love to put self-centered people into humiliating situations. (Case in point: Fawlty Towers, a lot of Tom Sharpe's ouevre.) And yes, there are some very cringey scenes here and there, especially when Jen gives in to her worst impulses and winds up in a mess as a result. But this is a show that genuinely seems to like its characters, and keeps finding new sides to them rather than playing the same side over and over again. Even just over the course of one season, the four leads have evolved a lot, and Jen in particular seems to grow up a bit. I quickly found myself super invested in Jen and Carrie, in particular — and Kash is utterly lovable despite being, at times, a bit of a wanker.
Extraordinary is funny enough to make up for the total lack of funniness among most of the award-winning, celebrated comedy shows on recent TV. It's also a constantly inventive piece of speculative fiction, that bursts with ideas. I cannot wait to see where season two takes its themes of manky empowerment and cruddy chosen family. Please give this show a chance — like I said, if you start now, you'll be caught up in time for season two!
Stuff I Like Right Now
I've caught a bit of the show Warrior in the past, but never managed to watch all of it — but now it's on Netflix. I've finally been bingeing it, and dang, it's so freaking good. A Chinese guy named Ah Sahm travels to San Francisco in the 1870s to look for his sister, only to get sucked into a war between the city's main Chinese gangs. It's violent, stylish and dark as fuck, and I love it so much. The episode where Ah Sahm and his gang brother Young Jun travel to a tiny saloon in Nevada is one of the coolest hours of television ever made — and I didn't even realize until afterward that it was directed by Kevin Tancharoen, whose work on The Brothers Sun I was just praising recently. Warrior is based on the writings of Bruce Lee, but it also feels like part of the same moment that gave us the TV shows Into the Badlands and Wu Assassins, both of which also feature wuxia action and Chinese culture in America. I like all three of those shows, but I think Warrior is by far the best of them. I'm stoked to see it becoming a bigger hit on Netflix.
My Stuff
I haven't shouted enough about this in a while, but... I wrote a young adult trilogy! The first book, Victories Greater Than Death, came out in 2021. The final book, Promises Stronger Than Darkness, came out last year and is coming in paperback in April. These books are full of space battles, queer joy, complicated alien politics, people respecting each other's pronouns, kissing, ethical dilemmas, and what I hope is a thoughtful take on what it means to be a real hero. Russell T. Davies, now once again the head writer of Doctor Who, read Victories, and here's what he had to say:
It's properly, wickedly exciting — I devoured it! How Anders packs so much power and energy into her prose is astonishing. These characters — and the adrenalin, the sheer excitement — will live on in my head long after the last page. Glorious. And the most amazing thing of all is her imagination — to think of a new evil superpower for a villain should be impossible. Completely impossible. Everything's been done, every sodding thing. Until this arrives. Dazzling. Horrifying. GENIUS. A beautiful book. I loved it, can you tell?!
And these books, in many ways, are my love letter to Doctor Who, alongside Steven Universe, She-Ra, The Owl House, and all the classic space operas. I'm probably never going to write books like these again, but I'm so proud of them and really hope you all like them too.
The latest episode of Our Opinions Are Correct is about the whole idea of canon and why we don't like it. Canon has two meanings: which stories are Important, and which stories really happened within a fictional universe. And both of those notions are about gatekeeping and imposing value judgments on subjective stuff that ultimately doesn't matter much. Plus we learn about tsunamis in lakes, rivers and even creeks!
My latest book review column in the Washington Post just came out! (Paywall-free link.) These are five of the best books I've read in ages.
The Trans Nerd Meet Up is this Saturday!
You can buy two trade paperback collections featuring Escapade, the trans superhero I co-created: New Mutants Vol. 4 and New Mutants: Lethal Legion. If you want the very first appearance of Escapade, you need to find a copy of the 2022 pride issue, which is on Marvel Unlimited but otherwise (sob) out of print.