Few words put me on guard more than “special.” Being warned that someone is “a little special” a storm is brewing and you spend your life looking for “someone special” to end up accepting that what is truly valuable, you just have to see. First Dates, It’s meeting someone normal. “Special” is a bear trap camouflaged in a sumptuous orchard, a semantic trompe l’oeil. In the tronchante Extraordinary makes you special the same thing that in any Marvel series would not make you pass as extra: lacking superpowers, because in the alternative reality it proposes, when you turn 18 everyone receives theirs, everyone except Jen, the protagonist, so sarcastic and mean as the British canon marks from Mildred Roper to Fleabag. I point out that they are powers that would not earn them a place in The Avengers: There is a guy whose rectum is a 3D photocopier and a woman who talks to the dead, but not to help them in their transition to the afterlife like the selfless Melinda of Among ghosts, But for mundane matters, see making fun of Hitler or getting breakup advice from Lady Di herself.
They will tell me that it is not new, the world of comics is saturated with crappy superheroes and some also jumped onto the screen, there are the mystery men with his deadly flatulence exhaler and his invisible man who can only disappear when no one is looking at him; We have also seen misfit young people who do not know how to confront their powers since Misfits to Gen V. What the series by newcomer Emma Moran provides is the absence of the slightest epic, no matter how pathetic it may be. Nobody here wants to protect humanity, they have enough to protect themselves, there are not even villains, the biggest threat is a telepath who wants to get her ex-cat boyfriend back – cheers for Luke Rollason, the most expressive frown since Rowan Atkinson.
What Moran proposes can be understood as a lukewarm denunciation of the overabundance of heroic fictions—on Disney+, it’s funny—but the fantastic thing is a mere macguffin, we could change the lack of powers for the lack of a partner, a stimulating job or a decent apartment and he would not resent it. Its true center is not the extraordinary, but the everyday: love, friends, family and the transition to adult life; the desire to integrate into a system that, surprise, is hostile whether you are in your twenties, in your sixties, “special” or a crappy superhero.
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