Review: NBC’s ‘Powerless’ is all about the aftermath of those superheroics

With “Powerless,” NBC gets a show set in the DC Comics universe heretofore mainly the province of Fox (“Gotham,” “Lucifer”) and the CW (“Supergirl,” “The Flash,” “Arrow,” “DC’s Legends of Tomorrow,” “iZombie”).

It is not an adapted property, however, but an original office comedy, set at a company that makes products to protect ordinary citizens from becoming collateral damage in a world where superheroes and villains clash on the streets and in the sky. (Superman crashing into buildings, we are told, is the No. 1 cause of workplace injuries.)

On the basis of its pilot – the sole episode available for review – it’s a pleasant show, a little on the old-fashioned side formally. With a quality cast that includes Vanessa Hudgens, Danny Pudi, Ron Funches, Alan Tudyk and Christina Kirk, it seems crafted to sit compatibly alongside the returning “Superstore,” another single-camera workplace sitcom, in the NBC Thursday lineup.

As someone who still thinks that the Adam West “Batman” is the best of all possible Batmen, I am more favorably inclined toward this take on the comics than the new dark ones that dress their heroes in Kevlar (Super-Kevlar, most likely). Classic DC comics have a daffy streak, a candy-colored, Pop Art innocence that used to set them apart from Marvel Comics, with their more philosophical, self-doubting characters.

Hudgens plays Emily Locke, who comes from a “flyover state” (“Superheroes never stopped there, they just flew over it”) – and is taking up a new job in Charm City, a midsized cousin to the more metropolitan Metropolis and the more Gothic Gotham. Traveling to work in an elevated train for her first day at work, she rides into the middle of a business-as-usual battle between two DC Comics characters, Crimson Fox and Jack O’Lantern. Emily is excited, but her fellow riders remain cool: Kids don’t look up from their video games; a man in a suit says into his smartphone, “Siri, push my meeting an hour.”

Emily has been hired to head research and development at Wayne Security, a division of Wayne Enterprises – as in Bruce Wayne, Batman under the cowl. The company is run, badly, by Wayne’s incompetent cousin Van (Tudyk), a character with comic-book canonicity whose lines at times sound inspired by statements of a certain sitting president: “I’m more of a big picture guy,” he says to Emily. “Look at this picture [of himself], this picture’s huge.” And, “I feel like I could commit vehicular manslaughter and I would get away with just a slap on the wrist.”

Like Mary Richards taking up her associate producer post in “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” Emily has spunk — which makes her seems suspicious or pathetic to her weary new co-workers. A familiar mix of underachievers, dreamers and dealers in snark, their ideas for new citizen-protecting products are invariably shot down “because they’re too expensive” or “too dangerous” or “because you need a piece of the sun to power it and that’s impossible to get.”

“I disrupt,” says chief design officer Teddy (Pudi), introducing himself. “I alter the structure of expectations, make people see things in new ways. For example, what do you think this is?”

“A desk,” Emily replies.

“But what if it wasn’t? What if it was the opposite of a desk?”

(It’s just a desk.)

The pilot takes them through the usual procession of high hopes, temporarily dashed hopes and sudden inspirations, toward a resolution that will allow the series to continue. There’s no reason to wish that it won’t, and — though creator Ben Queen left before production began — every reason to expect that it will ripen in time, as actors and writers all get to know one another and the world they’re making. That is how it works with even the least sitcoms; it’s their superpower.

‘Powerless’

Where: NBC

When: 8:30 p.m. Thursday

Rating: TV-PG-LV (may be unsuitable for young children with advisories for coarse language and violence)

robert.lloyd@latimes.com

Follow Robert Lloyd on Twitter @LATimesTVLloyd

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