One Season Wonders: Ben Edlund’s Satirical Superhero The Tick Tried To Hit It Big 20 Years Too Early
Photo Courtesy of FOX
In the years before streaming, extremely niche TV shows faced uphill battles against cancellation. As a result, TV history is littered with the corpses of shows struck down before their time. In One Season Wonders, Ken Lowe revisits one of the unique, promising scripted shows struck down before they had a chance to shine.
The ’90s may have been the real beginning of the superhero craze in film and TV, but that genre’s ascension to the most money-making stories and properties in Hollywood was by no means assured. Marvel went bankrupt in 1996 after several of its major artists left to form Image Comics a few years earlier, setting off a series of events that have culminated in our current moment—Deadpool is the Marvel character in theaters as you read this, co-created by Rob Liefeld, one of the Image defectors.
Hollywood certainly seemed to want to capitalize on comic book films, even if it had no idea what it was doing: The Alec Baldwin-led The Shadow and the Billy Zane vehicle The Phantom weren’t bad movies, but they were also not what comic book aficionados were into right around then—this was clearly the result of the instincts of 70-year-old men remembering what comics they liked when they were teenagers, before things like color film. But in their defense, what were the soft, precious Hollywood producers of 1993-1999 supposed to do, make a Batman: The Killing Joke or The Watchmen movie? Nobody with any money was ready to go around killing Jason Todd or Uncle Ben back in the Clinton administration.
It is therefore sort of endearing that there was not one, but two adaptations of the satirical comic The Tick before 2008’s Iron Man even hit theaters—the hilariously subversive 1994 animated series that aired on FOX Kids and was something of a sleeper success at three seasons, and the one-season wonder that is 2001’s The Tick. What was going through producers’ heads? Normies barely cared about earnest comic book stuff back then. Even the 2016 series only lasted two seasons. Why on Earth did anybody think network television could support superhero satire in 2001?
The Show
The Tick is a big, huge guy (Patrick Warburton, free at last from being Elaine’s boyfriend in Seinfeld), dressed in a blue spandex costume with weirdly prehensile antennae. He’s an earnest dope who pontificates nonsensically about righting wrongs and fighting evil, but seems too simple to actually realize who the bad guys are half the time. Though, as his hapless sidekick Arthur (David Burke) soon discovers, the other, more accomplished superheroes are all so self-involved that they are sometimes just as feckless as the Tick. Arthur, who dresses like a moth that looks like a rabbit with a wing-suit harness, is the earnest heart of the show, the Tick a kind of cypher who helps bring that earnestness out in him and their other companions: the no-nonsense-unless-it’s-sleeping-around Captain Liberty (Liz Vassey) and the arrogant lothario Batmanuel (Nestor Carbonell, whose presence as the mayor in The Dark Knight, I swear, is a stealthy callback to this show).
Together, they embark on superheroic adventures—some of the time. Mostly, they’re dealing with their own insecurities, shortcomings, and the mundanities of the real world. Arthur is committed to an asylum when his family learns he’s thrown away his steady job as a CPA to jump off of buildings. The Tick gets a ticket for superhero-ing without a license, only for his comrades to discover that he has no memory of who he actually is, and the woman claiming to be his wife is an impostor who goes and collects amnesiacs. The heroes are asked to join a clear analog of The Justice League, only to be confronted by the reality of it.
The Tick is about those conversations they have in Clerks or Mallrats about who would win in a fight or what other mundanities would arise from the inherent un-realism of superhero narratives. It is not about the costumes, it is about how and where they chafe. It isn’t about the villains, it’s about what activity the heroes are going to need to heave a sigh and abandon in the moment when they strike. It isn’t about the powers, it’s about how they might manifest mid-coitus.
Warburton, it must be said, is the best-suited actor possible for this silliness, with his instantly recognizable deep voice and his statuesque physique. There won’t be a Big Guy who was so born to play a particular role in a TV show again until Alan Ritchison’s turn as the title character in Reacher. Neither the cartoon version, nor the 2016 show’s Peter Serafinowicz, has quite nailed it like Warburton.
I generally don’t like that kind of thing—just be earnest, I say. But The Tick has some earnestness at its heart, with people occasionally moved by Warburton’s expertly unhinged-from-reality rambling. It also featured some ringers-in cameos or one-shot appearances in its short run, including Christopher Lloyd, Ron Perlman, and Armin Shimerman, all in the most hilariously immature roles.
So Why Did They Cancel It?
The world was not ready to drag superheroes in this particular way on a live action show on network TV, and also, the show aired on FOX, not the most merciful channel when it comes to canceling quirky but promising shows. Most importantly, though, is something that I feel the Spider-Verse movies have been trying to teach us, something that film is resolutely ignoring: this stuff just works better as cartoons, guys! The Tick, the animated show, held out for three seasons, made kids raise their eyebrows the same way Animaniacs and Freakazoid did, and probably had some of their Gen X and Boomer parents doing a double take. Imagine a Tick made by the same animation team that did Across the Spider-Verse.
Best Episodes
The show had an abbreviated run at only nine episodes, and it feels like it couldn’t quite be as salacious and unrestrained as it wanted to be. Besides the hilarious pilot (with that Lloyd cameo), “The Funeral” (in which our gang tries to hide the body of a famous superhero that Captain Liberty screwed to death) and “The Tick vs. Justice” (in which the Tick runs afoul of the justice system while contending with a Hannibal Lecter-like supervillain who revels in technicalities) are both standouts for their irreverence.
Shows to Soothe the Pain
Obviously, you can watch the other two The Tick shows if you specifically want more of justice’s happiest warrior. The cartoon show in particular is worthy of a rewatch with adult sensibilities.
For earnest superhero fare that isn’t afraid of hammy villains and swooning love interests, just give in and get into the “Arrowverse” of Arrow, The Flash, Supergirl, and DC’s Legends of Tomorrow. Who are you to resist it?
For more irreverent superhero takes, Peacemaker and The Boys are where it’s at.
Tune in next month as we saddle up with Bruce Campbell himself in Briscoe County Jr.
Kenneth Lowe is the wild blue yonder, the front line in a never-ending battle between good and not so good! You can follow him on Twitter @IllusiveKen until it collapses, on Bluesky @illusiveken.bsky.social, and read more at his blog.
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