"M.O.D.O.K.", and how being your own villian, with you already being a villain, makes you, paradoxically, a... hero?

What a sh*tty and complicated stylization of the title. To write it you need to learn a new kind of keyboard while having a stroke. And people are still wondering why it did not got a second season.

Mechanical Organism Designed Only for Killing, or MODOK (Patton Oswalt), is a Marvel Comics supervillain that due to his laughable gargantuan head all the time has to use an aero-chair and has the dream of conquering the world to found the Modok Empire. But, his company's economical issues, his new boss Austin (Beck Bennett) and his villain ego war with Monica (Wendi McLendon-Covey) just complicates his divorce from Melissa (Melissa Fumero), and his sons, Jodie (Aimee Garcia) and Lou (Ben Schwartz), family crisis.

It is really pleasant to watch a short show, just ten episodes of twenty minutes each. No space for filling there, some not even for the episode's plot. Is a different superhero story, at least on its tone and focus, told through a stop-motion animation in the style of Robot Chicken. It looks cheap, you can see the shortcuts that were taken to animate faster and it is evident the materials that were used to craft these dolls. This supports the postmodern aesthetic they are going for, the "deconstruction" of these characters, and remits directly to the fact that is an adult animation; curious that the animations made for adults usually tend to look cheap in some way. It is a "sh*tty" product made to be consumed quickly, almost as your conservative filled false patty, or at least that is the impression the show wants to transmit you.

The comedy works. Patton Oswalt is a really funny guy and he clearly loves comic books. I recently read his introduction (maybe it was the preface…) for a Neil Gaiman's Sandmand volume, and in this series he includes big, as well as obscure, Marvel Comics characters. In the writting there is an evident passion for the material they are all working on. The jokes go from something metafictional and playful with the medium of animation, as well as the main character being an unfiltered bad person, some word play is also there, and a couple of jokes are plainly absurd, grotesque or dark. The show goes from the most innocent physical joke about Modok character's "womb breaking head", as well as some gorey moments that laughs about death.

On other side, the dramatic and narrative aspect of the writting is not that well achieved. There are some good and emotional bits, as well as deep character interactions, but in other times it is rush and almost parodic. The last episode is the worst offender, instead of resolving what they planted in it, and all through the season, just promise to resolve it in a second one; that as the reunion of One Direction is not going to happen anymore. The narrative structure is weird, some episodes are almost stand-alone with a looming threat in the shadows for the end of the season (almost like Power Rangers), and other episodes, as Rick Sanchez (from Rick and Morty) will put it, "run on canon". It is a weird mixture between an attempt of a long arch show and one with autoconclusive episodes, and does not really work as any of them. Because, the episodes rarely touch both aspects of Modok's life (family and professional), so in some episodes certain over-arching subplots are, like the sons of mexican politicians in Europe*, left behind and return half season later.

Even with this, there are some concepts that feel really creative and kind of deep. For example, all through the show it is clear that Modok is the one who is causing himself everything bad that happens to him, his own ego and superiority complex is what makes him his own worst enemy, and one of the main antagonist in the season is a past version of himself; it uses sci-fi to bring its core concept to a concrete narrative aspect. There is some cool dynamics on how Modok grows and tries actively to be better, with his family and all aspects of his life, but his own character deficiencies are the ones that cause him to make mistakes again, for every two steps forward he trips one. It is a charismatic and likeable villain, who wants to be better and value his life, but at the end he cannot truly let go his evil ways. Normally there are redemptions archs and the villian turns out to be an ok guy, sometimes even the hero of the story, but here Modok is a villain beyond redemption, not for his evil actions, but because he is so corrupt not even he could see himself as not the bad guy.

It is a funny show, with a playful and plastic animation, that is not affraid of exploring different aspects of a villian, without letting it completely become a good person (M.O.D.O.K. walked so The Penguin could run). There are some issues as narratively and dramatic inconsistencies, and poor (for not saying failed) continuity concerns. Yet, there is honest care and passion for the character and Marvel Comics, which is enough to make this Campbell's Soup can villian (Warhol should be proud) a working protagonist, making the writters the true heroes here.

* Just to give context, the wife of a jailed mexican politician (Javier Duarte) now lives in Europe with her son, who she abandonned out of her house when a journalist was trying to get an interview with her,