Hopefully Legion will inspire other superhero shows to look and feel a bit more off the beaten path

The Ringer

"Per its own creative team, Legion is best taken in as an 'experience' rather than a TV show," says Miles Surrey of the Noah Hawley FX superhero series finale. "That is (respectfully) a somewhat pretentious way to look at a series that largely embraces comic book tropes with an uncharacteristically vibrant visual palette. But if showrunner Noah Hawley aimed to place more emphasis on style rather than substance, the series certainly achieved its goal. There is a mind-numbing amount of superhero content across television and film, but Legion’s three seasons are among the most distinctive and arresting works in the genre...Then measured against Hawley’s other show (the Fargo anthology series), additional programming from FX, or offerings from networks like AMC or HBO that are broadly defined as 'prestige TV,' Legion has often felt a step behind the curve, and as a result, has largely been ignored by the Emmys. But if considered on the merits of its place in the current superhero landscape, Legion was a bright spot—willing to zig where other superhero programming zagged, and willing to get supremely weird at times where a more traditional route could have sufficed. If other superhero shows were standard bedside lights you can purchase at IKEA, Legion was huge-a**s lava lamp."

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• Legion ended with unrealized potential: "For most of the show’s run, Legion’s aim was to dazzle, the smoke and mirrors and choreographed dance battle sequences hiding the fact that it wasn’t really about anything at all," says Eric Thurm. "This is a show that spent its first season asking what mental illness even was, man, before deciding the answer didn’t matter. The second season recruited Jon Hamm to do elaborate narration about delusions for no reason and staged equally elaborate musical numbers where the whole emotional point was contained in the title of the song. This is a show that, in its third season, became a superhero story about not wanting to kill someone while claiming that as special and not the basic premise of Batman. I responded to moments of Legion because I vibed with its project, but all of the aspects of that project ended up working better in other shows."
• Legion's ending was remarkable, the kind of twist a Marvel movie wouldn't be able to get away with
• Legion said goodbye with perhaps its boldest gambit