2 out of 5

Developed by: Daniel Cerone and David S. Goyer

Constantine the movie slipped onto screens a little ahead of the comic book movie explosion.  It suffered from speculation – he has black hair?  He’s American? – but it made it, and it wasn’t all that bad.  But times have changed.  With our always-on media culture, productions are exposed from start to finish to anyone who can Google, and Marvel / DC “cinematic universes” are real things.  We were watching the television of Constantine from decision to decision.  And it was an uphill climb.  The initial trailer looked alright, but several major-channel friendly tweaks started to trickle out and suddenly we were doubting before we were viewing.  To some extent, we were right to.  Constantine – despite nailing casting for the lead with Matt Ryan – felt so sterilized and homogenized for TV, lacking the bite of the comic or the gloom of the movie.  Zed – Angélica Celaya – a psychic, and Chas – Charles Halford – were too ready-made as buddies, the plot of “rising darkness” that downtrodden sorcerer Constantine must battle chopped up into way too inconsequential episodic blips, despite attempts to toss comic bookery around.  But, slowly, closing in on the midway point of the season, the show seemed to stop caring about aiming for broad appeal – John was meaner, smoking more – and then suddenly the side characters seemed to gain a bit more personality as well.  Agents of SHIELD had a similar shaping up, but it took it a good 16 episodes to find its feet out of a full 22 episode season, and unfortunately, Constantine was stunted at 13.  Despite it getting better as the episodes wore on, it still dipped too much into formula to really embrace the chaotic nature of the source material, and it needed a bit more time to shake the malaise of the beginning of the season.  So time will tell: a second season, a different home.  It’s a show with promise, and hopefully this first season will be the one to look back on and say you can skip ahead to much more exciting stuff.