Titans Is Irreverent, Innovative And Sadly Inconsistent

The first new series from the new DC Universe streaming service, Titans, wrapped up its short first season last week. If you’ve seen it, or any of the marketing material, you know it is a live action, take on the comic book Teen Titans, darker and more profane than the previous cartoon versions, Teen Titans or Teen Titans Go! on Cartoon Network. If you have kids that are fans of the cartoons, keep them away from this show. It is even darker and more profane than the trailers indicate.

Titans has some impressive strengths to counteract its troubling weaknesses. Overall, it succeeds more than it fails, but it has some serious problems that should be solved before the next season. So below is my spoiler-free review of Titans, revealing no more specific information than you would have got from seeing trailers or commercials.

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Out of the gate, you should know that despite any ludicrous controversy over the lack of comic-accurate looks or not, Titans is set absolutely squarely in the DC comic book universe — perhaps even more so than the other Berlanti Productions shows, the CW Arrowverse. References to comic characters and locations in Titans makes that absolutely clear. To say any more about that would entail spoilers.

Going froward with the review, I’ll break it down into three parts: Cast, Production and Writing.

Cast
The cast of Titans varies from pretty good to very good, with no single standout or no terrible weak link. The core Titans team of Dick Grayson/Robin (Brenton Thwaites), Kori Anders/Koriand’r/Starfire (Anna Diop), Gar Logan/Beast Boy (Ryan Potter) and Rachel Roth/Raven (Teagan Croft) are all solid without any real standouts. If there are any complaints about how their characters come across on the screen, it is usually due to writing problems, which we will get to later. 

The secondary characters are where the real acting shines. Alan Ritchson as Hank Hall/Hawk and Minka Kelly as Dawn Grainger/Dove are very good. I admit I haven’t seen Ritchson in anything since he portrayed Arthur Curry in Smallville as little more than an excuse to get beefcake wet. Boy has he improved immensely. Rachel Nichols (spoiler character redacted) is almost unrecognizable at first, and delivers a powerful performance.

Even Curran Walters as Jason Todd/Robin brings a cocky intensity that is lacking in almost all the other performances, one perfectly fitting for Jason Todd. 

Production
The best thing about the production aspect of Titans is the reliance on location shooting. The worst thing is the continuity issues that come, in part, because of the reliance on location shooting. Filmed in and around Toronto, the producers make good use of the landscape to evoke northern Rust Belt and Upper Midwest U.S. locations, such as Detroit, Chicago and rural areas of Ohio and Wisconsin. 

However, since the show takes place over a few days to at most a couple weeks, and the filming took much longer (possibly with reshoots) the outside locations go from snowstorms and inches of snow to — not kidding — someone just days later in the show timeline outside gardening, holding a basket full of freshly picked vegetables.

While I find such stupid continuity mistakes really annoying, I applaud the producers (including comic book superstar Geoff Johns, who stepped down as president of DC Entertainment to focus on work like co-developing, writing for and producing Titans) for choosing locations for the most part over studio sets (although there are clearly some of those).

The special effects are generally good, with an occasional cheesy explosion, and a cumbersome transformation scene whenever Gar moves from animal to human form. 

And despite the trailers, the show isn’t always shot with a grim blue filter. Some of the night scenes have really effective, natural-seeming available light, and the daytime shots generally look like the weather they were shot under. Yes, there is too much of a reliance on the “DC dark” blue tint, but much less so than the trailers made me think.

Writing
First, as I mentioned above, Titans isn’t a kid’s show. The language alone makes that clear. The “F__k Batman” line Dick says in the famous trailer is just one of many, many F-bombs. It is joined by a plethora of other curses, including a few MF-bombs. The language apparently isn’t what got the show its TV-MA rating though — that is the bloody, realistic violence and even gore. And that violence is as often as not directed at police officers. The show casts all costumed crime fighters as vigilantes in the eyes of the police, and it is a justified designation. Batman and Robin are frightening opponents as much in the eyes of the cops as the bad guys, because they injure and maim cops almost as much as they do bad guys.

Even worse, some of the Titans kill cops. And not — as far as we are shown — bad cops on the take, but just line officers trying to get in their way. Not in flashbacks (although there too) but in story continuity, cops get injured in a way that will permanently maim them, and cops get killed. This alone is the most serious alteration from the comic books, and makes the dispute over whether or not Starfire has a costume seem petty and meaningless — OK, even more petty and meaningless than it was already. But in some cases that fits perfectly with the character, specifically Jason Todd.

If only all the characters were so well written. Rachel pivots from sullen goth teen to desperate, frightened girl with no indication that either is her real character. She has no agency of her own, simply written as a damsel in distress, brought on by her own frightening powers. She also shows no inkling of the toughness required to handle those powers, something even her version in Teen Titans Go! exhibits.

Hawk and Dove, on the other hand, are so well written (and acted) that I want a spin-off series right now. The two episodes that focus mainly on these two are the best in the 10-episode season by far. This is likely due to the fact they are both written by Geoff Johns, who is only listed as a co-writer on a couple other episodes. And while it might be a bit spoilery, the fact that one episode out of only 10 is nothing more than an hour-long ad for the upcoming Doom Patrol series is bad story construction — as much as I am looking forward to that show. The episode does almost nothing to advance the overall Titans plot that couldn’t be done in 2-5 minutes in another episode.

The last writing problem is the season finale. Without any details, it plays as a mid-season finale for a show that will be back in six weeks or so, not a full season finale for a show that may not have even begun filming its second season. As of writing this on Christmas Eve, we have no idea when Season 2 will premier. Oh, one bit of advice, there is a post-credit scene at the end of the finale that you should watch. It is both very exciting, and very stupidly cheesy. 

Overall, I am looking forward to Season 2 when it happens. I really hope the show’s producers, –Johns, Sarah Schechter, Jeremy Carver and Greg Berlanti — both improve the character writing and rein in the violence against cops. I’m not advocating for making the show less gritty and violent, just that it shows respect for the job that one its main characters, Det. Dick Grayson of the Detroit PD, has chosen.

Overall, I give Titans 3.5 out of 5 stars.