Many people were worried when The Tick relaunched on Amazon Video. We didn’t like the pilot very much and worried our favorite spandex-wearing, musclebound blue guy was forever destined to mediocre live-action reboots. Well, The Tick is getting a full series on Amazon and after talking to writer Ben Edlund and Barry Josephson there might just be hope for the series yet.
Edlund wanted to make sure he kept the fans of the old Tick show, animated and live-action, happy. “Cults are scary, to present something to those people who this means something is scary, I know what it feels like when they get all urinated on and you go ‘oh man,’ that is something I was desperate to not do which was risky and scary.”
Working on something fans have grown up isn’t easy, but Edlund feels he lived up to the challenge. “No matter what happens, you can feel that the people working on are earnest, we aren’t just doing it because we had the rights to the Tick, ” Edlund says. “I think the nostalgia effect is going to happen, that’s why we try that, we don’t want to miss it up, there are people counting on us.”
One of our biggest problems with the pilot was the omission of the titular character, the actual Tick. The two men assured me The Tick would be front and center in the actual show with there being “at least two-thirds more Tick” according to Josephson. “There’s nobody who writes like Ben. The Tick in the pilot episode only shows up for seven minutes, Ben made a decision to have the show weigh more heavily on Arthur and that was not necessarily the funny part of the show” Josephson said.
Another problem we had was the lack of actual jokes in the pilot. For a show about a man in skin tight blue outfit, it was fairly dry and serious. Josephson assured me that there will be more jokes in the full series, enough to make even the hardest die-hard fan ecstatic. “(The jokes) come with the Tick, he really affects the telling of story, his fight in the pilot is a cartoon fight. The next fight he has Arthur next to him so you are going to get a different POV entirely.”
The Tick couldn’t have happened without Amazon Video, who were behind Edlund’s vision 100 percent. “Amazon is looking for new forms of entertainment, they have been very aggressive not falling victim to pre-existing notions of genre or television, we are in a whole new place without commercial breaks,” Edlund says.
Amazon has ordered a full Tick series, with my childhood’s favorite super-strong bug man coming to the streaming service sometime in 2017.
