Maybe it’s just me, but it seems like SyFy is trying way too hard to land a hit series these days. They’ve tried to get in on the superhero craze with the mediocre Krypton series of last year and the over-the-top and terrible Happy in 2017. But so far success has for the most part eluded them in the original series front. And now comes their latest series Deadly Class based on the comic book of the same name. I wouldn’t say that it’s a bad show, but that being said I wouldn’t say that I’m quite sold on it yet either.
In Deadly Class it’s 1987 and teen Marcus Lopez Arguello (Benjamin Wadsworth) is on the run from the police after setting a fire at a boy’s home where he was living that killed dozens. Which ironically makes him the perfect candidate for the mysterious school King’s Dominion where youth from all around the world are all taught the art of murder and assassination. Why would there be a school for teens to learn murder and assassination, you ask? Well, that’s never quite explained, at least in the first episode. But children of the Yakuza, drug cartels and southern gangs are all in attendance learning how to get away with murder.
Marcus accepts the offer from headmaster Master Lin (Benedict Wong) but quickly finds that he might be in over his head as friends are hard to come by, one student threatens to kill him and his first homework assignment is to go out, find someone to kill and get away with it.
Think Harry Potter with the school for teens hidden away from prying eyes meets Stranger Things with 1980s synth-pop on the soundtrack along with Battle Royale for the mood and you’d be pretty close to what the first episode of Deadly Class was.
Maybe this all works better as a comic, but here it was a bit odd. It seems like whomever developed this show wanted it to be edgy and dark, both literally and figuratively. So it rains all the time in Deadly Class, the f-bomb is dropped from time to time and everyone’s a smoker. Which is fine, but like I said it really seems like SyFy is trying too hard here to get something edgy that gets people talking again about the show and network and I didn’t think it was quite working yet here.
