SummaryMarcus (Benjamin Wadsworth) is recruited by an elite private academy called Kings Dominion, where the world's top crime families send their children in this series based on the Image Comics graphic novel by Rick Remender and Wes Craig.
SummaryMarcus (Benjamin Wadsworth) is recruited by an elite private academy called Kings Dominion, where the world's top crime families send their children in this series based on the Image Comics graphic novel by Rick Remender and Wes Craig.
You'll like Deadly Class from the beginning, but it takes a beat for you to actually fall in love. There is one exception to that statement. Lana Condor, who became an internet sensation last summer as Lara-Jean Covey in Netflix's To All the Boys I've Loved Before, is an immediate stand-out from this remarkable cast.
Occasionally the dialogue lays into this a bit too thickly, via character soliloquies resembling anti-corporate rants from the “Repo Man” school of screenwriting. Viewers turned off by that won’t be impressed by the cynicism winding through the opening episodes, either. But the central cast, led by Wadsworth and Condor, wins you over eventually--or, I should say, the most fleshed out characters featured within the first four episodes do this.
Deadly Class doesn't make much sustained sense, either as practical reality or pointed satire. (It is, in any case, no way to run a school.) But it has rude energy (and many bad words) and a certain conviction, and possibly what seem like bugs in its system will prove to be features instead; the creators do not seem unaware of internal inconsistencies in their creation. And many viewers won’t see a problem.
It’s a frustrating run of intoxicating highs and off-putting lows, at least in the early going. ... As it stands, uncertainly, at the starting gate, it’s poised somewhere between pass and fail.
The series’ dedication to a dark and violent world of murderous impulses--or cultivating them--is a bummer. Deadly Class asks what it takes to change the status quo, but its answer so far is not particularly revolutionary.
The series repeatedly asks its audience to rationalize murder. It weighs the value of human life in summary judgments doled out by anyone willing to act. Episodes reframe those decisions, but without definitive emphasis. At best, it’s a murky portrait of extreme ideas. At worst, it’s irresponsible.