Summary

Supacell is a new, diverse superhero show about regular people gaining superpowers and dealing with their new abilities.
The show centers on Black British characters facing social issues like sickle cell disease, subverting genre expectations.
Supacell’s success stems from its focus on real-world problems while using fantastical elements to tell its story.

Prime Video’s The Boys is one of a kind. After all, there’s no other show about the corporate-sponsored celebrity superheroes who are the de facto leaders of the country and the gang of men and women trying to stop them. But recently there has been a show that takes up The Boys’ theme of superheroes. Of course, it’s not as if this is unusual. Plenty of shows have done their takes on what people with superpowers can do, and what people without superpowers will do against them. However, it’s unusual for a show to have those superpowers spread across a swath of people, both good, bad, and somewhere in between, but that’s exactly what Netflix’sSupacell has done.

The first season of Supacell introduces us to five normal people in South London who suddenly find themselves with superpowers. They must figure out how to control them and what they want to do with these powers, and they must figure it out fast because there is a mysterious band of people looking to imprison them. Let’s take a look at why fans of The Boys should check out Rapman’s (aka Andrew Onwubolu) new superhero series.

What Is Supacell About?

Since it came out, Supacell has consistently been in Netflix’s top 10 TV shows and has a perfect 100% critics score on RottenTomatoes, and it’s easy to understand why. Supacell centers on Black British people who are suddenly imbued with superpowers. We follow five of them — Michael (Tosin Cole), Tazer (Josh Tedeku), Sabrina (Nadine Mills), Andre (Eric Kofi Abrefa), and Rodney (Calvin Demba)— as they first discover they have powers beyond their wildest dreams — or nightmares.

Michael, a delivery driver, is the first to learn he has a power (time travel) when he suddenly travels to the future and meets up with himself. His future self tells him his fiancée, Dionne (Adelayo Adedayo), is going to die, but if he can assemble the other four people Michael is fighting with, he can save her. As a result, Michael’s life becomes about finding Tazer, Sabrina, Andre, and Rodney, people from very different walks of life who Michael doesn’t know.

Netflix

The others deal with the revelation of their powers in different ways. Tazer, a gang member, uses his ability to turn invisible to take out members of a rival gang with a knife. Sabrina uses her telekinesis to protect herself and her sister, Sharleen (Rayxia Ojo), against the men who supposedly love them. Andre uses his super-strength to steal money from an ATM to try to get ahead, hopefully, while giving his son, AJ (Ky-Mani Carty), a better life. Rodney uses his super-speed to make more money from the drugs he’s selling.

While Michael tries to recruit them to his cause, they are all dealing with things in their own lives that make them reluctant to join him. After all, these five may have superpowers, but they aren’t superheroes… yet. But then a group of masked people with powers come after them and they have no choice but to come together and fight against them.

Supacell may be a superhero show, but its first season is like a prologue. This is clearly the first part of a much bigger story. The first six episodes establish how these five superpowered people come together, but there’s clearly more to tell, as was seen in the scene where Michael travels to the future.

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How Are The Boys and Supacell Similar?

On their surface, The Boys and Supacell don’t seem to have anything in common. The Boys is a satire that reflects modern concerns in fantastical settings. Supacell is much more serious. Its five characters don’t want superpowers, and they have to come to appreciate those powers in their own ways. Yet, while these two shows have vast differences, if you look closer, you’ll find they both share an interest in social commentary and approach that interest from fascinating angles.

The Boys takes on the current state of superhero media in general, as well as our current political landscape. From the beginning, the show looked at superheroes from a different perspective than most media. Like the comics of the same name by Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson that The Boys is based on, the show deals with corruption at the highest levels, which in this case comes from superheroes, especially the biggest superhero of all, Homelander (Antony Starr).

“We just wanted to do a very realistic version of a superhero show, one where superheroes are celebrities behaving badly,” The Boys’ showrunner Eric Kripke told The Hollywood Reporter. “When [Trump] got elected, we had a metaphor that said more about the current world. Suddenly, we were telling a story about the intersection of celebrity and authoritarianism and how social media and entertainment are used to sell fascism.”

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Turning Disease Into Superpower
Supacell, on the other hand, deals with real-world issues like knife and gun violence and sickle cell disease. The sickle cell storyline is particularly potent because TV and movies so rarely deal with the disease, to the point where very few people know about it unless their family and friends are affected. Given that the condition affects those of African and Caribbean descent, there are whole swaths of people who know very little.

But in Supacell, Michael’s mother is dealing with the disease and the show displays the pain and suffering that comes from it. Michael, as someone who has a parent affected by sickle cell but is not impacted himself, is a “supacell.” That is, someone in whom sickle cell has mutated and instead caused them to develop superpowers.

“I never understood why there was a disease out there that mainly affected us [Black people],” Rapman said in an interview for Netflix UK and Ireland. “So I said, ‘I wanna do something that empowers Black people and something that sheds light on sickle cell.’ But, at the same time, we spin it on its head, and it makes it great. So, for example, if I was suffering with sickle cell, it’s hard to live with, but I would live with that happily knowing my kid would be extraordinary.”

Nothing can match The Boys’ specific tone, but who wants a lackluster copy anyway? Supacell is the perfect accompaniment because it subverts genre expectations and uses a fantastical world in order to tackle very grounded and real issues. Given how successful the first season has been, you can bet that it’ll get a second season — and go on to superhero infamy, much like The Boys.