Misfits

I came to Misfits skeptical because everyone was comparing it to Skins, and I was tired of British teen dramas that promised darkness and delivered mostly just pretty kids being pretty and sad. Skepticism plus some drinking means eventually you watch the first season anyway, waiting to be vindicated or surprised.

The setup is deliberately stupid: a group of teenagers doing community service in a London community center get struck by lightning and develop random supernatural abilities. Curtis can jump forward and backward in time, Simon becomes invisible, and Alisha—when you touch her, you immediately want to have sex with her, right then, no negotiation. In the first episode they accidentally kill a street worker, and his girlfriend shows up as an amateur detective seeking revenge. It’s crude and absurd, and somehow that works.

The show lives in that E4 space where everything is damp and fluorescent and every kid is broken in some specific way. You stay curious about what they’ll do next, even when the characters are hard to like and the story keeps spiraling into weirder territory—sex with grandmothers, time-travel loops, existential crises in the same beige room. There’s an energy to it, even when the execution is off.

But most of the cast are genuinely unsympathetic in ways that aren’t interesting. And because 98% of the show happens in that one community center, it starts to feel claustrophobic in the wrong way—not intense, just repetitive. The supernatural powers are excuses more than plot. When it works, it works because of spite and strangeness. When it doesn’t, it’s just people being difficult in a boring location.

I don’t regret watching it. The first season has something, some scrappy willingness to be crude and weird. It’s not good television and it’s not quite bad enough to stop watching. It’s the kind of show that works if you like this particular E4 flavor and you’re patient enough to tolerate characters you don’t care about in a room you’re tired of looking at. Which I apparently was, for a while.