Misfits (2009)

Misfits: Series 2 Episode 2 review

It's not often you see some very British electricity pylons used in an American south-style montage, featuring a kidnapped victim in the trunk of a car with a from-the-bottle-swigging driver sweating profusely, but that's the kind of unusual televisual treat Misfits is.

If you open a window, you can probably hear Britain's impressionable youth still cheering Asbo superhero drama Misfits, back for a second series of rampant implausibility and - this being one of those meretricious, late-night shows aimed at outgrossing the expectations of parents who happen to catch their teenagers watching it - rampant everything else. It started as it meant to go on, with thought-reading chavgirl Kelly visiting Nathan's grave only to find him alive again (though six feet under and, I'm afraid, masturbating down there). "What - a man can't have a little shuffle in his own coffin?" he complained when she and the other four dug him out. "It's not as if I was expecting visitors."

There was a superb villain waiting for them back at the community centre (where the five have to report every morning for penal drudgery) in the form of evil, snooker-ball-eyed Lucy, who was soon using her shape-shifting powers to confuse the feckless five into murdering their new probation worker (I should perhaps mention they had already murdered their last two in similarly confused circumstances, the most recent still in the freezer among the Cornettos). It was a cracking ending, with Nathan, who has been less than a credit to his poor mother, testing out his newly discovered gift of immortality by getting himself impaled on a water pipe. Blood, guts, juvenile humour, scenes of a sexual nature. I know it's wrong, but some nonsense is impossible not to enjoy.

Misfits teens put the Asbo into Superhero

It's the surprise cult hit that takes the US myth of the superpowered and relocates it to underclass Britain. But not everyone loves the show.

Realism is the great strength of Misfits, the drama based around five Asbo teens with superpowers, back this week for a second season. Sure, they might variously be immortal, telepathic, able to turn back time, become invisible and turn anyone into a sexual predator (not the most useful, that one), but the young cast delivers its lines with such nonchalance that it all seems perfectly reasonable. Nathan, on discovering his probation worker lying dead in a deep freeze, gives the most throwaway line of the lot: "Oh, hey man, Cornettos!"

The writers should be applauded for the consistent bathos. At the very start of the episode, a mysterious hooded figure, seen only at the very end of Season One as some sort of guardian angel for the misfits, is seen free-running, leaping from rooftop to rooftop until he stands, Batman-like, surveying the city. He must contact them ... by launching a paper plane that hits Kelly in the eye.

Batman is not the only visual reference; we go through Heroes, Star Trek, X-Men, Saw and even a postmodern take on Scooby Doo ("It's the probation worker," says Nathan of his No 1 suspect. "It's always the probation worker"), but it is all worn so lightly that each homage adds to the whole. And the whole is quite something: bawdy, fun, dramaturgically electrifying, and a brilliant put-down of any show that has ever made too much of foreshadowing. "In six weeks it's all going to change," says the immortal Nathan (clearly the most quotable of the quintet). How? "We finish our community service. I'm going to join the circus. They can throw knives at me, stick swords in me, shoot me in the face. People pay good money to see that. And then I'm making serious cash." Quite right: who'd really get all superhero-ish just because they've got some powers?

TV review: Misfits

Teens, superpowers, lots of talk about shagging and cheerful swearing: clearly not a show to appeal to everyone. But hang on, they didn't win that Best Drama Bafta by accident.

Series two of Misfits, and the E4 comedy about a bunch of asbo-toting teens with superpowers looks unlikely to disappoint. The grubbier, funnier cousin of America's Heroes began with Nathan awaking in his coffin to discover that, contrary to all appearances, last season's gory impalement was not enough to finish him off. "I'm immortal," he declared. And indeed he was: he has a superpower after all.

It wasn't Nathan's only excuse to rise from the grave. Like buses, impalements tend to come all at once, and so it was that he found himself skewered once again. The group were being pursued by a shape-shifter, first encountered by Simon in a psychiatric ward. She wanted revenge on his friends for taking him away from her, though, on the verge of turning them in for the murder of their latest probation officer, backed down. Still, our heroes aren't in the clear just yet: someone else knows about them, too. A masked intruder has begun popping up in unexpected places, and looks bound to dominate the next few weeks' viewing.

Misfits storms back with nearly 1m viewers

E4 superhero drama's second season debut pulls in more than double the launch audience for the first series of the show.

A little light relief was on hand from a new series of Misfits, the tale of five teenagers on community service who are getting to grips with the superpowers given to them by a freak electrical storm. Nathan - whose gift of immortality was only revealed to us and him at the end of season one, when he woke up in coffin - was overheard obtaining a little manual relief by Kelly (who can read minds that are six feet underground if the - um - expression is intense enough) and unearthed. This was to the great relief of claustrophobics, if not to the rest of the group who do, after all, now have to deal with him again. If there's one thing cockier than Nathan, it's an immortal Nathan.

After that, things pelted along at an exhilarating pace. There's a shapeshifter, a shadowy watcher, a new probation officer vying with the kids for the 2010 Disaffection Award, a light sprinkling of sex and drugs and, by the end, a couple of dead bodies. Misfits still has its revivifying mix of wit and energy, along with a measure of grittiness that keeps it from spinning off into Heroes-like cartoonishness or Skins-like smugness. The cast are all excellent, but Lauren Socha's Kelly is a perfect portrait of a genuinely unhappy teenager, an endlessly, magnificently pulsing mass of insecurities and hostility. Iwan Rheon as Simon breaks your heart even as he's pulling murdered probation officers out of the freezer - a misfit even among misfits. Bold and brilliant stuff.

TV Review: Misfits 2.1

There was a real confidence and swagger to this opener. It's certainly one of the most visually creative shows on British TV right now, having the flair and aesthetic of a cool indie movie.

Misfits, Thursday 10pm, E4: review

Misfits absolutely crackles with energy, with a unique look and shooting style combined with great editing and a thumping eclectic soundtrack that's a key part of the show.