The Broken Academy
A billionaire industrialist ends up with seven children born mysteriously on the same day to unconnected mothers around the world. He builds them into a superhero team called The Umbrella Academy. By their teens, it all falls apart. Decades later, the surviving six have to reunite as adults in their thirties—Luther, Diego, Allison, Klaus, Vanya, Number Five—when their adoptive father dies. But the investigation gets immediately derailed because they can’t stand each other and also the world is ending.
This is the premise of The Umbrella Academy, created by Gerard Way and Gabriel Bá—and yeah, that’s the Gerard Way from My Chemical Romance. On the surface it’s absurd: mysterious simultaneous births, a billionaire training kids to save the world, a family with superpowers who can’t even talk to each other. But what makes it work is that the premise serves the actual story, which is about trauma, estrangement, and the impossible weight of family expectations. These kids were designed to save the world, and instead they destroyed each other.
The Netflix adaptation takes that core dynamic seriously. The apocalypse is real and immediate, but it’s almost incidental to the actual plot, which is watching this broken family try to function for long enough to prevent extinction. They’re fighting each other more than they’re fighting the threat. There’s something darkly funny about that tension—a show where the external stakes are massive but the internal disaster is what actually matters.
Comic-to-screen adaptations are wildly inconsistent. Sometimes you get something that captures the weirdness and energy of the source material. Other times you get a competent but soulless adaptation that just hits the plot points. The Umbrella Academy has enough conceptual strangeness and enough emotional weight beneath the premise that it seems like it could actually work. Whether it sustains that for a full season is another question, but the foundation is there.
I’m curious how much of the melodrama and genuine darkness carries over, and whether the show understands that the family drama IS the main event. That’s where most comic adaptations lose the thread—they treat the personal stuff as a subplot when it’s actually everything. If they get that right, this could be something.