For the newer DCEU tv shows coming, especially from the new DC Universe platform releasing later this year. Here's the first trailer for the new Titans tv show. Personally, I think it looks awful.
It looks like they saw the success of the Marvel Netflix shows, and thought, hey, people want dark, so let's make it dark, even though the best part about the Titans is that they're NOT dark. I am looking forward to Young Justice season 3 though.
I subscribed to this service today, mostly for Young Justice season 3 which started earlier this month. I have watched the first episode of Titans. As expected, much more violent than you would expect based on the comics or the cartoon. There were a few fairly gruesome scenes - Raven's adoptive mom getting shot through the head with a bonus closeup of the dead face; Robin rubbing the child molester's face in the broken glass; Raven making the bald guy barf up his own intestines (or something). The scene where Robin rubbed the guy's face in the glass reminded me of the Netflix Punisher series - gruesome violence for no real story reason. Oh well, I guess it's the world we live in now.
My wife and I watched the entire run of Titans, it was surprisingly not bad, like the trailer made it look. I actually enjoyed it more than any of the CW's DC shows.
I'm four or five episodes into Titans now, and it's getting fun. The portrayals of the Doom Patrol and the Nuclear Family are great. Hawk and Dove were a little cliche - hey, let's make Hawk a painkiller-addicted freak who can't get it up - but I'm looking forward to the Doom Patrol series coming next month.
I was surprised with just how much Hawk & Dove are in the show, and that they haven't received their own spinoff yet.
I finished Titans. It ended in kind of a weird cliffhanger - I mean, definitely a cliffhanger but with some unresolved threads that you can't see how they can't pick up immediately where this one left off. The last episode was all about turning Dick to the dark side, but meanwhile, Kori and Donna Troy are stuck outside the force field or whatever, and from the previous episode, Hawk and Dove are going to find Jason Todd and come help. There was a difference in how they introduced Hawk and Dove, versus how they introduced the Doom Patrol - it's more like Hawk and Dove (and Donna Troy) are going to continue in the Titans show, but Doom Patrol was clearly setting up a spinoff. And they gave Hawk and Dove more backstory than even Beast Boy. I'm used to thinking of the Titans as the regular set from Teen Titans Go minus Cyborg, but Hawk, Dove, Donna Troy and Jason Todd seem to be as much continuing characters as the regular four.
I saw the first episode of Doom Patrol. It was fun. Alan Tudyk's narration was great. Some of the characters were given less backstory than I would have liked -e.g. Negative Man got a lot less backstory than Robotman - but there's time to improve on that. They kind of ignored all of Titans and the existence of Beast Boy - they could have had a quick cameo during the "fast forward" part when Robotman was building his car track over time, but instead they just kind of pretended that Beast Boy was never there. The end of the episode was surreal and awesome. I want to see more.
Second episode of Doom Patrol. "Who are you talking to?" "Grant Morrison fans, reddit trolls with DC accounts, and the three new fans who stuck around after the donkey fart." He's talking to me! I feel seen!
Doom Patrol is still fun, but it might be too weird to stay good through 15 episodes. If a big chunk of the humor is just Robotman saying "what the ********?" when something weird happens, that's going to get old before the season is over. An example of a show that was too weird to survive was "Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency" on BBC America a year or two ago. Loosely based on the Douglas Adams novels (as in, both the novels and the TV show had a character named Dirk Gently who was nominally a holistic detective, but plot wise there was no overlap as far as I could tell), the TV show was one of the most surreal things I've seen, and it got to the point where it was incomprehensible - just too many weird characters and happenings to keep track of. Doom Patrol could potentially head that way. So far, they're more or less staying on track - find Mr Nobody so they can find the Chief - and adding backstory in a measured pace - I thought Negative Man got less exposition the first couple of episodes, but there was more about him in the third episode - and letting different characters take the lead by splitting up the team in different ways - in the second episode, it was Cyborg who led a couple of others into the donkey, and in the third episode, it was Jane who brought a couple of others to Paraguay. So there's good stuff going on, just concerns of mine that they can't keep it up over the whole season.
Nobody else watching Doom Patrol as it's released? Gonna binge it later? I like it a lot more than Titans. The first ten minutes of today's episode was just about incoherent, but then it got good with the singing horse. Mark Sheppard is a good guest star for this kind of show - he was great on Firefly.
If anyone is still watching Doom Patrol - it's weird, and wild, and the last episode is this week (May 24). I'm not sure how to describe it. Most of the plot elements come from the Grant Morrison comics, which were weird and surreal, and I can't claim to be an expert but if you're going to turn the Grant Morrison Doom Patrol comics into a TV show, this is pretty close to as good as you can get. The only complaint I have is that the main characters are just reacting to weird stuff happening to them - so far, they've been very rarely active characters, more often saying "what the ********?" when weird things happen to them - in the last few episodes if they happen to come together as a team, that would be a bonus, but they haven't acted like a team yet. But so far it's been a tour of the weird stuff that Grant Morrison was writing a couple of decades ago. Still entertaining, but not all that satisfying. Better than Titans, though, that's for sure.
I'm about 5 episodes behind now, but am still planning on finishing this. I'm looking forward to Swamp Thing starting in a couple weeks.
Bump. Apparently, Doom Patrol season 2 is coming this week, but I have also been watching Harley Quinn, which is awesome, and Stargirl, which is OK. Stargirl is also on the CW (broadcast, you know, old fashioned live TV), but the commercials happen at weird times, while on DC Universe the show doesn't have built in commercial breaks so I find it better on DC Universe. It seems like it was written for streaming so there aren't any appropriate pauses for commercial breaks. Stargirl is OK, along the lines of the other CW DC shows like Flash and Arrow. My wife gave up after the first few episodes when they kept giving each teenager an awful tragedy in their past - if she wants to watch bad things happen to people, she'll watch the news - she didn't find Stargirl to be escapist enough for her. Harley Quinn, though, is awesome. If you can get past the language and insane cartoon violence. My son (currently 14, but he watched some of the episodes when he was 13) thought it was high-larious - we showed him the one where Dr. Psycho joined the team after being ostracized because he called Wonder Woman the c-word. It's a very well done show, with a great supporting cast, and well thought out storylines with character development and everything. Highly recommended.
I'm caught up on the first three episodes of Doom Patrol season 2. It remains weird. There are moments when it's interesting and there's a lot of time where it's just waiting for Robotman to say "what the ********?" again.