2 out of 5

Developed by: Raelle Tucker, Naomi Alderman, Claire Wilson, and Sarah Quintrell

covers season 1

We’ve backed ourselves into a weird place with TV. What makes it to or kicks it before a second season is, I think, as tempestuous as ever, we just have so much content available to us at all times that the cycle / decision making appears hostile. However, there’s no longer a standard delivery method or type of show: episodic, linear; a weekly drop, the binge model. We also rarely have 22-episode seasons anymore.  

All of this has been for a net good, I think, but it puts creators in a jam of needing to tell stories in a very flexible way, potentially appealing to all of those aforementioned formats. Or, at least, that’s how it seems with a show like The Power, which has some amazing ideas to play with – and some very capable actors – but nearly squanders most of its potential via scattershot structural approach, applying what would require a broader palette onto a comparatively tiny, 9-episode one, and rushed to grab eyeballs episodically while also trailing things out for longer term storytelling… 

The main conceit of The Power is “the skein,” an organ which has suddenly activated worldwide for girls of a certain age, giving them all the ability to control electricity. While this is initially explored as something people keep secret, the reality of the modern world is that media and social media would prevent such a thing, and so it’s not too long until the power enters the public eye and discourse. 

The nature of the idea is purposefully intended to explore gender roles, and that’s exploded in various ways: how does this play out in a social setting, for those formative, teen years? How does it play politically, when politicians start talking policy supporting or limiting such powers? Religiously – is this a sign from god? And how about on a world stage, with different cultures?  

If it seems like these are giant questions: yes. And to The Power’s credit, it doesn’t talk to these concepts with an exclusionary voice – as opposed to starting out with a bias, that the world automatically gets better with women in power (as that’s the overall shift implied: you’re leveling the playing fields by dint of giving women a means to literally fight back), the show tries to more realistically ask what might happen if you dropped such a shift on us overnight. And, y’know, people gotta people: no intention is allowed to be altruistic, and we see how there’s still going to need to be work done, not just in terms of any transition of power, but also larger cultural societal shifts, which are almost impossible to conceive. That is: even if we’re all the same, won’t there still be people who want something else? Does this equality erase anger, or jealousy? 

Again, big questions. And incredibly interesting ones. 

Certainly not answerable by a single show, but The Power’s writers often seem unclear as to what they were even asking, and mask that by pairing big ideas with watered down talking points as a compromise. The result is often frustratingly shallow, sometimes to the point of being ignorant. This is stacked on top of disappointing character arcs which are, again, a blend: there’s an attempt to find humanity in the various expressions of power, but then in order to consolidate, we rely on people acting as gigantic archetypes, and as things go along, this requires bigger and bigger gaps in characterization, with people swinging to reactionary POVs pretty instantly. 

I’ve avoided discussing character specifics because there are a lot of spoilers there, but at a high level, the political angle is explored through Seattle Mayor Margot Cleary-Lopez (Toni Collette); a street-level view from crime boss Bernie Monke (Eddie Marsan) and his illegitimate daughter, Roxy (Ria Zmitrowicz); religion is poked at, as Allie (Halle Bush) hears “the voice of god,” instructing her how to user her power; and the world stage is looked at via journalist Tunde (Toheeb Jimoh) and his eventual interactions with Tatiana (Zrinka Cvitešić), the wife of the Moldovian president. These are all worthwhile angles, but perhaps all in need of their own shows, or, again, more than nine episodes. While it would have been equally ignorant to focus on only one take exclusively, by centralizing a character, the series could have branched out, instead of running things concurrently. This probably would have been most logical with Collette’s character, as her other family members – a conflicted father (John Leguizamo); a son who gets involved with incel politics; and a daughter (Auliʻi Cravalho) trying to juggle high school’s dramas with all of this – provided plenty of material that ended up getting quite shorted.

I realize it ultimately wasn’t a very popular show, but I feel like the Y the Last Man adaptation is tangential to this, and, in my mind, an infinitely better attempt to examine something similar, without relying on soap opera and TV-nonsense tropes to create forced drama or conflict. It also had a wide cast, but allowed them to develop equally, and didn’t use them solely as puppets for a concept, which is, I think, The Power’s main sin: it starts with what seems to be a balanced hand, and inserts some science to ground the idea, which can effectively rope one in. But it’s as though we never end up back-filling the promise with actual content, and the show just barrels forward, being bold with attacking this concept, and then whispering when it forgets things and tries to insert them at the last moment, and over the course of the show, it hollows itself out of impact.

(As a final side note: yes, this is adapted from a book; the above is not taking into account the effectiveness of that adaptation, and how that format might or might not be a better fit…)