“My Motto is Start Small.” “You Had Me Jump Off a Bridge.”
I’ve pretty much decided to give any superhero show on the CW a chance, so I planned to watch Naomi as soon as I heard about it. I kept going, but it didn’t grab me like I had hoped it would, and I wasn’t that sorry when it was cancelled.
Naomi (Kaci Walfall) is a pretty typical teenager. She and her adoptive parents, Jennifer and Greg, (Mouzam Makkar and Barry Watson) have moved quite a bit thanks to Greg’s career in the Air Force, but Naomi has made some great friends in their current town, including Annabelle (Mary-Charles Jones). About the only thing that sets her apart from your typical teenage girl is her obsession with all things related to the pop culture character Superman.
And then something strange happens. After blacking out during a stunt where someone tries to impersonate Superman, Naomi starts discovering she has powers. At first, she tries to hide them from everyone, including her parents, but they don’t stay secret for too long. Where did these powers come from? Why do some people seem very interested in her and her powers?
This isn’t necessarily an original premise for a superhero story, but it definitely had promise. I wouldn’t say I was hooked at the end of the pilot, but I was certainly intrigued and wanted to see where they were going to go.
Sadly, as the series progressed, the story didn’t. I felt like each week was some shade of the same story over and over again. It is amazing how we’ve gotten used to stories that advance these days, isn’t it, when in the 1980’s, we essentially watched the same story over and over again. I think here, part of the frustration was it felt like the story should have been moving forward but it wasn’t.
And don’t even get me started on the main villain of the season. Turned out to be very underwhelming, and we were left with an anticlimactic climax and a cliffhanger that really didn’t fit the show.
Now, this isn’t to say I completely hated the show. I really did like how close Naomi was with her parents. Yes, that gets tested over the course of the series, but I liked how close they started out. That’s sadly rare on TV.
I also really liked Naomi and her friends. Their relationships were fun and felt real to me. Her relationships with potential love interests Nathan (Daniel Puig) and Lourdes (Camila Moreno) were also interesting.
I have to praise Kaci Walfall. She brought an earnestness to Naomi that seemed very real without being hokey. And when the script called for her to have fun, she was able to do that well, too. The rest of the cast played their parts perfectly. The special effects were good, too.
The show was enough of a mixed bag that I was leaning toward giving it up at the end of season one, but then it was part of the bloodbath at the CW this past season, making the decision easy for me.
With the weak final episode and the cliffhanger, I only recommend this show if you are really interested in it and missed it when it aired. The good in Naomi didn’t quite outweigh the flaws in this superhero show.
I've never heard of this series! I'll have to check it out.
ReplyDelete