Show Guide

The Tick

2001 FOX 30 min Comedy, Action, Science-Fiction

8our take /10

7.1IMDb /10

In a world where criminals rule the streets, evil has finally met its match. There is a new protector of the weak and oppressed, the hilarious blue defender of goodness, known as The Tick! Together with his sidekick Arthur and their friends - the insatiable Ba

Our Review

The best live-action superhero comedy ever made, canceled twice because the universe is a coward. Amazon’s take on Ben Edlund’s big blue doofus is surprisingly philosophical: Peter Serafinowicz’s Tick is a cheerful cosmic amnesiac who may be a coping mechanism given flesh, assigned to protect The City — and Griffin Newman’s Arthur, a terrified accountant with a flying suit and a dead family’s trauma, is the show’s real protagonist. Their odd-couple dynamic (the Tick as externalized courage, Arthur as the anxious man learning to fly) gives the comedy a genuine emotional floor.

Season 1 is a near-perfect 12-episode run with one of TV’s best cold opens (a competent superhero team getting slaughtered in the pilot). Season 2 deepens the mythos (Dangerboat the sentient ship, the bureaucracy of AEGIS) and ends unresolved — Amazon pulled the plug on a cliffhanger, the second time this property died on TV mid-flight. Jackie Earle Haley’s Terror is a villain for the ages.

Verdict: Watch it. Spoon!

Seasons

The Tick — Season 1

9 episodes

Season 1 of The Tick premiered 2001-11-08 and ran 9 episodes through 2002-01-31.