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Get a Glimpse of our Grim Future in the Trailer for FX’s Legion

There’s a disheartening theory that superhero movie fans started floating around the time Marvel started planning theatrical releases by the decade: The fact that superhero movies are sucking all the air out of the room doesn’t much matter because studios will still make all the types of films they always did, they’ll just also have superheroes in them.

What’s more, superhero films were bound to get better, as Marvel and DC hired talented up-and-coming directors to lend their unique visions to their respective film franchises; never mind the constraints of the franchise or the other films they might have been making instead. A few years earlier, there was another reason not to worry that adult films were disappearing from Hollywood: Prestige TV would fill that void, with shows like Mad Men providing all the drama audiences used to get from mainstream films. Everything was fine! But now, with the trailer for FX’s Legion, superhero films extend their reach like Reed Richards into the realm of cable television drama, and all the worst prophecies have come true.

The show comes from Noah Hawley, who created FX’s Fargo, and could have spent the time he’s been working in the MCU on, at least, another competent cable potboiler. Instead, we get a show about an X-Men–style mutant with dissociative identity disorder. Downton Abbey’s Dan Stevens plays Legion, while Aubrey Plaza and Hamish Linklater take supporting roles. Legion could be top-notch, or at least as good as any superhero show will ever be—though it’s probably not good that Rachel Keller’s character has the sort-of-clever-but-not-really name of Sydney Barrett—but it’s a bad sign that superheroes have crossed the basic cable barrier. It’s only a matter of time before we get shows about superhero mobsters, superhero meth dealers, and Enlightened but Laura Dern can fly. Soon the only safe haven for nonsuperhero stories will be C-SPAN—but lately it’s been the worst superhero show of them all.