I'll just come right out and say it: Jean Smart deserves all the flowers. Audiences everywhere have fallen in love with the Emmy-winning comedy Hacks and Smart's ascerbic, quick-witted Las Vegas comic Deborah Vance, and rightfully so.
But hr brilliance extends far beyond the hit HBO series. I could point to her delightful performance as Charlene in the classic sitcom Designing Women, her formidable turn as first lady Martha Logan in 24, or her mafia-flavored bravado in season 2 of Noah Hawley's celebrated Fargo anthology.
I'm not going to talk about any of these shows. Today's focus is on the series that officially introduced Smart to today's fast-paced, genre-obsessed TV landscape. The avid comic book readers know where this is going. When it premiered in 2017, CNET described the show as a "kaleidoscope of Marvel madness." Allow me to introduce you to Legion.
Hawley is the creator behind the Marvel series. The show, which ran for three seasons from 2017 to 2019 on FX, follows a troubled man named David Haller (played by Dan Stevens), who is diagnosed with schizophrenia. He finds himself in a psychiatric institution and forges a special bond with a fellow patient named Sydney Barrett (played by Rachel Keller in her debut on-screen role).
Haller's mental condition is the emotional conduit for the audience and his relationship with Sydney is the foundation for everything that follows. The duo is soon transferred to Summerland, a different sort of institution. Smart's Melanie Bird is the psychiatrist who keeps the place running. Considering this is a comic book series, it's revealed that Haller isn't just dealing with a mental health crisis. He also has powerful psychic abilities he can't control because, as it turns out, he is the son of Professor X. Yes, that Professor X.
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Jean Smart as Melanie Bird in the FX comic book series Legion. FX Networks
As Haller soon discovers, his abilities are highly coveted and exist at the center of a power struggle. Bird and the other folks at Summerland make it their mission to rehabilitate the man who would later become known as Legion, and position him as their newest in Bird's powerful — yet underdog — gang of New Mutants.
If you're wondering (and you're reading this, so you probably are), Legion is an anomaly. Shows like this rarely get greenlit anymore, so the fact that it had three seasons is a gift in and of itself. It's a trippy treasure of a series that tackled grief and trauma through a superhero TV show lens years before Disney Plus did it with WandaVision.
Legion is technically a Marvel series, but it's also an X-Men spinoff that exists outside of the MCU banner. Aside from Haller, who comes from The New Mutants comics, every other character featured here was an original creation not tied to the aforementioned subject matter. This creative choice freed things up, allowing Hawley to expand on concepts introduced in the comic books without being married to the rules, lore or canon.
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