Misfits (created by:Howard Overman)

Imagine Smallville meets Kids, or even Heroes meet Skins. It is quite like that, but at the same time it is nothing like that at all. Misfits adds up a spicy handful of London street-slick wittiness – dirty and raw – like no other show on the air at the moment. Misfits was first broadcasted in the evening of the 12th of November, a stormy Thursday in 2009. The first episode introduces five youngsters on community service, each one with quite a unique social attitude that clashes between each other comically and insightfully. The five young assaulters are caught up in a storm and start to develop superpowers. Misfits was produced by Clenkerwell Films and it was promoted by online PR and social media agency Hot Cherry (Vine, R. 2009).
Between a mind-reader, a time-traveller, an invisible man and a special lady that sends people of to a sex frenzy by the touch of her skin, we find Nathan, a spoiled young man with authority issues and loads of sarcasm to share. He is one that has an answer for everything, that seems to be unaffected by the storm, for his dismay. The show slowly introduces the audience to an in depth journey to each of the five misfits back in to their past and reveals relevant social aspects of current London. The more you get to know the characters, the more is revealed that the superpower of each one is intrinsically linked to the roots of the development of their personality, which makes the show fascinating and it guarantees the good old attention grabber. The process of relating to the characters is of extreme relevance to the marketing strategies for promoting the series such as viral marketing, transmedia storytelling and microblogging service; for example: in the broadcasting of the first episode, you were able to receive “tweets” of the characters that would add to narrative material for the episode (Dowell, B. 2009).
Misfits serves quite a good range of a target audience. It brings more than those 5 characters for the audience to relate to. It deals with a realistic scenario independently of the unrealistic event. It has a fantastic cutting edge production. The photography is surprisingly impressive and it has an interesting usage of different lenses and colour balancing depending on the shot. The audio part of the series matches beautifully with the director’s cutting-edge style. Good selection of music chips in for the alienating experience. Radical sex scenes and unexpected darkish humour brings the show to an unexpected level amid murders and lovers, and it sure grabs the attention for the simple fact that is quite an fresh and perilous approach, and it just makes you glue to the TV trying to see how far can they push the limit! It is, I must say, quite an endearing experience.

Reference List:

Vine, Richard (13/11/2009). "Misfits: Series one, episode one". TV & Radio Blog. guardian.co.uk. Available from: http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv-and-radio/tvandradioblog/2009/nov/13/misfits-c4-episode-one, [Accessed: 28/07/2010].

Dowell, Ben (28/10/2009). "Misfits and Wonderland: Seven Pups for Seven People". The Guardian. Guardian Media Group. Available from: http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv-and-radio/2009/nov/13/misfits-review-asbo-superheroes, [Accessed: 28/07/2010].