Legion

You don’t watch superhero telly. I know. The quips, the CG city blocks falling over, the bit where someone puts a helmet on and the score swells. You’ve seen three minutes of it in a waiting room and decided it wasn’t for you, and I’m not going to tell you you’re wrong — most of it isn’t for you.

Legion is.

It opens like this: David Haller, a man in a psychiatric hospital, being interviewed about his schizophrenia diagnosis. Except the hospital might not be a hospital, the interviewer might not be who he says, and David’s memories keep contradicting themselves — in one recollection it’s summer, in another it’s snowing, and nobody in the show flags it because of course memories do that. Noah Hawley takes the premise of a comic book character — a mutant whose telepathy is so powerful he can’t tell his own thoughts from everyone else’s — and treats it literally. The show isn’t about a man with unreliable perception. It is a show with unreliable perception. The narrative structure is the symptom.

And because it’s built on dream logic, Hawley can do anything. A dance sequence in the middle of a hostage rescue. A sequence inside someone’s head rendered as a silent-film-era silent film, complete with iris wipes. A second season set inside a production design of pink walls and checkerboard floors that looks like Kubrick directing a Benny Hill sketch. The battles are fought in mugshot sequences, in split-screen, in a loan application form. Every episode has the confidence of something that knows the rules exist specifically so it can ignore them.

Here’s the cynical mechanics bit you’ll enjoy: because Fox owned the X-Men film rights and Marvel Television only had a licence, the show legally cannot say the word “mutant”. Ever. Three seasons of a story about a persecuted superpowered minority who are hunted and feared, and the actual word is never once spoken — so it becomes “a mutation in your genes”, a “special person”, anything the lawyers hadn’t blocked. The constraint becomes the aesthetic. It’s the most formally daring thing Marvel has put on screen and it happened because nobody in the room was allowed to just make more of the same.

Dan Stevens carries it, but Aubrey Plaza is the one you’ll remember — a character who is exactly what she appears to be, and then isn’t, and the reveal is the best scene the show does. Don’t let me spoil it.

Three seasons, complete story, done. No shared universe, no post-credits scene. It’s a superhero show for people who don’t watch superhero shows, and it ends on its own terms.

You think you don’t do comic book telly. This one anyway.