Marvel's New TV Series Is Perfect For Millennials

Just as you were taking advantage of the summer lull to make some headway on your Netflix queue, boom — add another item to your never-ending list of entertainment joy (they don't call it the golden age of television for nothing, folks). There's a new Marvel TV series called Champions coming out, and it sounds so essential that you might have to bookmark that intellectual Norwegian police procedural drama you've been dying to check out for another few weeks.

The show centers on a bunch of young Marvel heroes who decide to cut loose from their Avenger forefathers and figure stuff out for themselves. According to Entertainment Weekly, the characters include "Kamala Khan/Ms. Marvel, Miles Morales/Spider-Man, Sam Alexander/Nova, Amadeus Cho/The Hulk, Viv Vision, and a younger version of Scott Summers/Cyclops." Entertainment Weekly interviewed Mark Raid, the writer on the show, and artist Humberto Ramos and reported that the gang have "more youthful activist energy than Marvel’s traditional superhero teams." Waid in particular was explicit about the underlying politics of the show and the way it is — despite being a flight of fantasy — totally relatable for this generation. He focused on the way that things have changed so much over the past 15 years in the relationship between young adults and slightly-older-adults:

When we were growing up, the general perception was it takes adults to fix the world. Kids can do little things, but basically you have to wait till you grow up to make the big choices and the big decisions. Well, Mark Zuckerberg would disagree with you. Some of the other young trend-breaking scientists that are coming to light, online especially, would beg to differ with you. Those are the inspirations, as much as anybody else, for the idea that we don’t have to wait until we grow up to be Tony Stark or Captain America to make a difference in this world. We’ll find our way, and we’ll find our own way.

This is exciting because it's exactly the show our generation needs. With political climates in flux all around the world — from the election in the United States to Brexit in the United Kingdom — more than ever, younger people are looking for ways to be positive influences on the world around them and change things for the better. Though this show is about superheroes, it's also quite inspiring when applied to real life.

Perhaps we can learn something from Champions. Waid also commented about the name of the show: "They are ultimately very socially conscious, very activist-minded, and very positive about being superheroes, so the name had to feel like a really upbeat superhero name." Rather than feeling despondent about our political situation, let's watch a ton of Champions and get inspired — maybe we can be our own superheroes right now.

Images: Marvel Studios; Walt Disney Pictures (1)