The Comic: 5 Stars, must read, go do it now.
The Rundown: No Stars… just… no. Hey look, it’s the Lord of Hell, and he’s decided to start… solving crimes? For… humanistic reason? Sentimental reasons? It’s all kinda messed up.
The show Lucifer, based on the comic of the same name, is set in LA where Lucifer Morningstar, Lightbringer, Samael, Lord of Hell, is running a night club and just dicking around in the world upstairs. That is, until someone he… cares about (?) is killed and he decides he must track down her killer using his super Devil powers which are… getting people to confess to him. Oh, and animal magnetism to do with sex or something. Man, this is almost as painful to write as it was to watch.
The comic Lucifer, on the other hand, is an existential story based on a concept from Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman comics. In The Sandman, the anthropomorphic personification Dream visits hell to follow up with Lucifer, who he had dealt with on a previous visit. In a move that baffles Dream, Lucifer tells him that he has decided to quit Hell, being sick of the same scenery and self-flagellating souls that he has seen for thousands of years. He gives Dream custodianship of the key to hell, and makes his exit. He retires. The idea of the Devil as something other than the source of all evil is compelling, and the fact that he has desires that have nothing to do with souls, or the acquisition of power, or some grand pissing contest with G-d is what makes the off-shoot comic that follows a wonderful delving into the nature of godhood, and humanity’s connection with religion, belief, and stories.
The show, on the other hand, decides that its audience is too stupid to follow such a grand and complex story, and so instead ops for a Lucifer who is not introspective, who is not all-powerful, and for some reason is not all about himself. He comes off as a two-bit hustler, who keeps his true feelings of inadequacy hidden by a quick tongue. We have the shakedown by an Angel of heaven, where he is threatened and actually seems scared. One of the best parts of Lucifer’s character is that in the entire pantheon of the world he inhabits he is surpassed by one, and equal to only his brother, the other archangel Michael.
Instead we see a whimpering coward, who is fascinated by the woman cop who can resist his charms. Oh yeah, there’s a woman cop, police corruption, and some heartwarming moments of the Lord of Hell helping her kid with a bully problem. Seriously, w-t-f? The police procedural tropes are so strong in this show, it’s sickening that they could dumb down a grand story about the very nature of the universe into a show about the devil helping to catch two-bit criminals.
This true bastardization of character is never more present than in Lucifer’s faithful companion and lover, Mazikeen, general of the Lilim, the demonic children of Lilith. In the comic, she is a warrior to a fault, a demon with one half of her face beautiful and flawless, with the other half the visage of a rotting corpse. This is her choice, and a reflection of her demonic nature. When a magical being, thinking they’re helping her, ‘heals’ her face to make her totally beautiful, she responds by vowing revenge on that being. She vows to rip her guts out with her bare hands. That’s Mazikeen from the comics. In the show her purpose seems to be nothing more than to remind us that Lucifer is the Devil, and that she ‘didn’t leave Hell for this.’ What she’s referring to is mysterious, and they don’t even have the decency to ever recite her full name. She’s ‘Maiz’, probably because it sounds more trendy? I don’t know.
Suffice it to say, the show is a disappointment on pretty much every level. The effects are sparse, and then powers are used it’s nothing too flashy or impressive. The character of Lucifer is a buffoon, riddled with cowardice, deflection, and cheesy one-liners about being evil and the devil. The fact that in the first episode alone they feel the need to remind us over and over again proves that even the writer didn’t have faith in the concept, let alone the intelligence of his audience. I’d skip this, unless you have a real hard-on for supernatural police procedurals that retread ground that’s been gone over so much it’s pretty much a highway now. Tune in next time for when I punish myself further so you don’t have to!