9 Years Ago, A Forgotten Marvel Show Finally Brought a Beloved Team To TV With Some Major Characters

After the release of X-Men: Apocalypse, Fox was ready to reexamine how they approached their X-Franchise. The bloated follow-up to Days of Future Past was deemed too much by critics and fans alike. The next wave of mutant projects in 2017 would change the conversation. Logan would take Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine and put him in a personal story about legacy and loss. Two TV projects would also take a character-first approach to the X-corner of the universe. Legion took that character-first approach even further, going inside the mind of one of the franchise’s most powerful characters. The other would finally give the characters from the X-Men comics that were unlikely to see celluloid a chance to take center stage.

The Gifted premiered on Fox on Oct. 2nd, 2017. It was created by Matt Nix, the showrunner and producer behind the Bruce Campbell-starring hit Burn Notice. Bryan Singer directed the pilot. While the show didn’t have the exact continuity of the films, the show let the movies do the heavy lifting of explaining who the X-Men are. Matt Nix described it as its own “stream” within the broader X-Men multiverse, taking elements of the movies and comics. The show would focus on the Strucker family as they deal with their children’s newly discovered mutant powers. The Gifted would cast some genre royalty in the lead roles, with True Blood‘s Stephen Moyer and Angel‘s Amy Acker as Reed and Caitlin Strucker. With no X-Men to turn to, the Struckers join up with the Mutant Underground, whose membership includes some justice for a classic X-Man.

Not Not The X-Men

The show quickly establishes that the X-Men have gone missing after a mass casualty event at a mutant rights rally, referred to on the show as 7/15. The remaining non-X-Men mutants forming the Mutant Underground included a number of recognizable X-characters. Blair Redford portrayed Thunderbird, a character that made his debut in Giant-Size X-Men #1 alongside a team that would go on to define an era of X-Comics. John Proudstar was a Native American with super strength thanks to his mutant gene. Almost immediately after his introduction, he would die on a mission to stop Count Nefaria. The show, thankfully, corrects the error and makes John the leader of the Mutant Underground, elevating the character instead of ignorantly writing him out. He would be joined on the team by Magneto’s daughter Polaris, played by Emma Dumont. Oscar Isaac doppelganger Sean Teale would play an original character, mostly standing in for Havok as Polaris’s love interest, Marcos Diaz, AKA Eclipse. Batman: The Caped Crusader‘s Harley Quinn actress Jamie Chung would round out the team as fan favorite Blink.

The family is forced underground after Lauren and Andy, played by Natalie Alyn Lind and Wednesday’s Percy Hynes White, are revealed to be mutants. They join the Mutant Underground. Throughout Season 1, they would stay on the move, trying to stay ahead of Sentinel Services, a fairly practical reimagining of the massive Sentinels of the comics, and apparently the upcoming Avengers: Doomsday. Coby Bell would play the lead agent on their trail, a character whose life was affected by the events of 7/15. With the team constantly on the move with the Struckers, the show can be a little much in how it splits up its story beats, but the show does lean into the classic melodrama of the Claremont era. Even the X-Men missing is a borderline trope in the comics, with the original team being kidnapped by Krakoa and the Uncanny-era team disappearing off to the Australian Outback while the world thought they were dead.

Like the Claremont era, the main driver of the show was the personal relationships between the characters. Polaris’ push toward her father’s vision would be a major arc of the show, putting her at odds with her baby daddy Marcos. Her arc allowed for shadier mutants without full overtones of evil. The show introduced modern X-Men mainstays, the Frost Cuckoos, as representatives of a Hellfire Club faction called the Inner Circle. Two other factions would be introduced: the Morlocks and the human Purifiers, setting up a showdown reminiscent of the Marauders’ Morlock purge from the comic’s The Mutant Massacre.

Exiled to Television

Thunderbird and Blink have actually been on a team together before in the comic Exiles. In that book, Blink and a team of X-Men travel the multiverse, fixing problems so they can move on to the next world. Like Dark Matter or Sliders, but with mutant powers. In The Gifted, Chung’s Blink and Redford’s John Proudstar would supply the team’s CW-level chemistry. You had two Exiles members in an alternate universe X-Men story that stole the show. Fans would not be upset if Disney+ got an Exiles show starring these two bouncing through the multiverse. But alas, that show probably will only exist on another Earth. Exiles was written by Real World San Francisco alum Judd Winick, and Blink actress Jamie Chung was on The Real World San Diego. That doesn’t really mean anything; we just thought it was an interesting coincidence.

Unfortunately, the show was canceled in April of 2019 after two seasons. With so much superhero content available, The Gifted was just not enough of a draw to justify a return to that stream of the X-Men multiverse. The Gifted had a segment of fans kicking up a fuss when it went away, but this just wasn’t a battle they were going to win. Giant Sentinels maybe, but corporate giants are harder to defeat. All of the X-Men properties were shifting over to Disney thanks to their acquisition of Twentieth Century Fox. Dark Phoenix would be the last mainline Fox X-Men film and unfortunately left the entire era with a bad taste in audiences’ mouths. Now we all wait breathlessly for the MCU to bring us its vision of The X-Men, but 9 years ago, the Mutant Underground held us over as best it could. And sometimes that’s enough.

With all of the mutants featured on the show, who’s missing? Which mutant would you like to see make it to the screen? Let us know in the comments below.