When it comes to people getting superpowers, we are habitually used to two key constants:
- Not everyone gets powers with this massive evolutionary reserved for a select few (who also must look good in spandex and masks).
- Everyone takes them very VERY seriously.
Looks like, rather happily it should be added, that no one sent the memo to Extraordinary, which explores a world in which superpowers have magically been dispensed to everyone and they are so much a part of everyday life that no one blinks an eye if people fly pas their windows, flame shoot out of hands, or a man collecting cars parked illegally simply lifts them up with one hand and puts them on the back of flatbed truck.
It’s a superpower world and everyone is used to the fact that the person they encounter will be able to do something out of the ordinary, to the point that it’s now bog standard commonplace.
For everyone except wisecracking Jen (Máiréad Tyers) who alone among she knows, including housemate and best friend Carrie (Sofia Oxenham), who can channel the souls of the dead and her boyfriend Kash (Bilal Hasna) who can roll back time to a few minutes in the past, and her mum Mary (played by Siobhán McSweeney, whose gift is the ability to manipulate tech that, hilariously, she doesn’t understand), HAS NO POWERS.
Yup, not a one, not a skerrick, not a bit.
She is evolutionarily unadorned and while she tries to tell herself it doesn’t matter, it really a matters A LOT, especially when she’s working a dead-end job at a party hire shop, has no boyfriend and no real talents or prospects to speak of.
She feels very alone, and while Carrie is her bestie and Kash is a sweetheart, she doesn’t really feel like she belongs anywhere which helps explains why the generally likeable character can be a bit of a dick at times; hilariously so, with whippet-smart oneliners and comic delivery to die for, but yeah, for all her sassy talk and brush-the-world-off-her-shoulders talk, she’s not loving life when the show begins.
And honestly, this is all for the good for Extraordinary which has an absolutely quirkily anarchical blast skewering the fact that in a world where everyone has superpowers, they really aren’t that special.
Not really; everyone stages big 18th birthdays because it’s then that some magical DNA switch is flicked – at no time do we know why and no one seems overly fussed about finding out; the gifts are there and that’s enough – and so, with powers as common as cars on the road or birds in the sky, everyone treats the way flawed, broken and ill-judged people do.
Which is really very badly, with ego, self interest and a whole host of the lesser angels of our nature playing havoc with should be a magical thing but which isn’t.
Extraordinary, being a British show not hemmed by the prurient sensibilities of their friends across the Atlantic, makes merry with the idea of common superpowers meets fallible humanity, bringing a gleefully welcome comic book absurdity to the notion that was unique and special in any other reality is no more thrilling in lots of ways than paying tax or commuting.
Jen still harbours some hope that getting her power, and there’s a running gag throughout about going to a clinic that promises to make that happen that exemplifies how common as muck and corporate the superpower biz has become, will transform her life but one look around, if she was looking for the truth (which she’s not; where’s the hope-springs-eternal fun in that when life feels so bleak at times?) would confirm that superpowers ain’t all they’re cracked up to be.
Still, for all their banality, Extraordinary does have some fun with them.
Along with the usual people who can pass through walls or turn invisible or read minds, are the more unusually gifted such as Gordon (Eros Vlahos) who can induce orgasms with a touch – this leads to some ribald outrageously funny humour with Jen and I having awkward with a capital “A” sex where they can’t touch at all (Gordon wants to work for his and his partner’s climaxes), made all the funnier by how ill-at-ease he is with his gifting – PDF Guy (Joshua Reese) who can turn anything into an Adobe document, and Randall (Shaun Mason) who can 3d print with his arse.
It’s all gloriously and cleverly inappropriate and it works magnificently well. buoyed by sharp writing, comically inspired performances and a healthy dose of intimate humanity which, far from clashing with the more surrealistically madcap moments, actually feels like an organic part of the whole.
Hence, while we are treated to Jen doing unspeakably funny things at the clinic to enact her frustrated revenge at what they do and her own lack of powers, and Kash trying to start a vigilante group so his life means something (it doesn’t go well), we also see Carrie channelling Jen’s dead dad – they talk on the phone, not looking at each other, so the magic of the connection isn’t sullied – so her bestie can talk to him, and she needs his support, and Kash and Carrie trying to work out if they can continue as a couple when the former is a sweet layabout with delusions of grandeur but no career aspirations, and the latter is a junior lawyer with a love of art, fine dining and weekends way in Tuscany.
There’s also the charmingly oddball love affair Jen accidentally ends up having with a character known as Jizzlord (Luke Rollason; his character’s name comes from when he encounters Gordon and the inevitable happens) who — SPOILER ALERT!!! — is actually their onetime cat who, it turns out, is an amnesiac shapeshifter whose journey to humanity grounds the wilder, more hilarious elements of the show, and they are plentiful, in some real down-to-earth what it means to be a person moments.
He’s probably the heart and soul of the show, from a human perspective with Jen the emotionally honest but deliciously funny centre of the narrative, the two of them, plus a superb case of supporting characters lending the bizarrely funny lifeblood of the show, which is a laugh-a-second proposition, lending Extraordinary some real emotional weight to go with its laughs while it proves that even when the most wild thing possible happens to people, they keep being people with all the attendant struggles that brings.
Extraordinary is currently streaming on Disney+