Extraordinary: A Refreshingly Good Comedy
Extraordinary Gets A Lot Out Of Its Tropey Premise
Extraordinary is well-named. It indeed does go beyond what you would expect of a raunchy comedy, especially given the initial premise. I wouldn’t blame you if you’re tired of a show where everyone has superpowers, but I promise this one does use the concept for more than just visual gags (though it does have some great visual gags).
Instead of being about super-heroics or even villains, the superpowers fit endless metaphors, and the world building exists mostly to reinforce those metaphors. The most prevalent metaphor being powers represent adulthood. In their world, you tend to get powers around age eighteen, and they often push people into certain life paths or end up forming parallels to real situations you might find in adulthood (or earlier). A power might make people perceive you as only qualified for a narrow form of work (like one character who can breathe out helium) or function as a lifelong disability that affects how one lives out their adulthood (the main example in the first three episodes is too sexual for a PG13 article).
This Is A Shockingly Unique Take On Superpowers
Our main character, Jen, is obviously no exception. She’s well past eighteen and doesn’t have powers—a rare condition in their world. She also has a dead-end job, a terrible relationship with her older sister and mother, and is woefully unlucky in love. She’s a now-common comedy protagonist—stalled out in life and constantly being put in embarrassing situations. She could obviously work on herself without it having anything to do with having or not having powers, but the story and Jen make the adulthood connection on some level. Thus, giving Extraordinary its best trick: operating on two narrative layers.
If you want to watch this show for the high-level superpower gimmick, it actually puts in some work. Extraordinary still falls apart if you think about matters (there’s a confirmed afterlife for one thing), but there’s a lot more worldbuilding details considered than I expected. This is not a world where powers have always existed; it’s our world where powers started happening about ten years ago. And most powers are so minor that the show remains very much within smaller, interpersonal situations, so you don’t have to think about what must be happening to stuff like the global economy.
Extraordinary Doesn’t Explore Its Big Implications
Which actually gives us the second layer. If you’re watching this show for a fun, low-stakes comedy, it’s got that. The show is funny. Extraordinary is the rare sex-comedy that tries its best to be kind to its characters. It doesn’t rely on aggressively stereotyping or body shaming for its jokes and is shockingly sex-positive for most of its runtime. The jokes mainly rely on the general feeling of “Dang it, can things work out normally just once?” and general character flaws causing havoc. There are a few moments that don’t land or could be considered problematic, but you can tell how much work the writers put into making Extraordinary more feminist, more kind, and more inclusive than the usual fare. I only saw the first three episodes, and it could stand to have more LGBTQ+ characters, but I feel like Extraordinary simply hasn’t gotten to that yet.
Now, to be clear, Extraordinary is absolutely meant for an adult audience and discusses all manner of sexual content, including jokes I was a little shocked were made so casually, and should not be watched by younger people—but if you are old enough, if you want a show with a good variety of jokes and silly situations and don’t want to watch any of the standard sitcoms, Extraordinary seems like the real deal.
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