3 out of 5

Created by: Stan Lee, Neal Biswas

covers season 1

Ya see Stan Lee’s name on something, and if you’ve gandered at the media on which the man has directly applied his appellation in year’s past, you’re sort of expecting that sounds like…  Well, that sounds like a House of Ideas pitch from an old man who used to write comics.  And he teams up with someone else to put in the details, and it works for what it is, if you’ve got some nostalgic Lee appreciation.  But what is this Lucky Man deal?  Starring the wonderfully dour James Nesbitt, shot with a glum and grainy color palette, and airing on the UKs Sky 1?  It seems rather left field.

When you separate the pitch from the series, it becomes a little clearer: Stan Lee says, make a show about a superhero who’s lucky.  Neil Biswas – and a small cache of writers – take this and develop a mythology around a luck-gifting bracelet, of which copper Harry Clayton (Nesbitt) comes into possession, soon learning the give and take of luck – give some here, it’s taken away elsewhere – and that this bracelet, which can only be removed by death, is quite coveted by some quite dangerous people.  In the meanwhile, Harry, balance the suspicions of your good fortunes by your partner, Suri (Amara Karan), the dark shadow of your gambling debts which have tainted your marriage, and the hawkish we-have-a-muddled-history eye of your new boss, Winter (Steven Mackintosh).  So we emerge from this comicy pitch into a cop procedural with an appreciable quirk and some season-long mysteries.  It’s not a bad setup, and it’s not badly executed at all by the committed cast and production design.  There’re some cheesy 6-million-dollar-man effects when Harry’s luck starts to act, but that element of cheese aside, the sets and action pieces are all ably handled.  And the show succeeds, mostly, by barrelling full steam ahead with all of its plot threads, cycling through various cop tropes until we come to a head at about the right time: ten episodes.

When things slow down, the problems become pretty apparent: that Harry’s bullheadedness causes more problems than it solves, and that, in general, these are shit cops who don’t seem to have much procedure in their procedural.  But, as mentioned, the momentum’s the thing, and the characters – including a wonderfully sneery Darren Boyd as another DI who’s got it in for Harry – endear themselves to you in small but consistent ways.  Absolutely watchable, and you’ll find yourself telling people to just ignore the Stan Lee tag and go with it.