|
CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION | ||
|
Positive:
28
Mixed:
25
Negative:
2
|
Critic Reviews
ColliderJul 27, 2020
Season 2 Review:
After an intriguing but somewhat spotty debut in 2019, all signs point to series creator Steve Blackman and the rest of the Umbrella Academy team taking critiques on board to make a second season with a tighter story, cleaner execution, stronger performances, and even better world-building. ... A season of television even more must-see than its predecessor.
Read full review
ColliderFeb 1, 2019
Aug 3, 2020
Season 2 Review:
All that time spent on extreme exposition pays off in a flashier, more entertaining, tighter second chapter. Season one of Umbrella Academy set the board, and season two plays the game. There’s a lot more zapping and superpower-ing in season two, which should appease comic book fans who want to see superheroes do that kind of thing. But it also swings for something way more emotionally resonant.
Read full review
Jul 27, 2020
Season 2 Review:
The best thing that can be said about season two, then, is that it is that same show [as season one] but good. Not perfect, certainly, but if Sir Reginald Hargreeves has made any of his terrible lessons abundantly clear, it’s that people will continue to improve if you repeatedly tell them that they’re bad and you don’t love them.
Read full review
The TelegraphAug 8, 2024
Season 4 Review:
All these balls are juggled with lunatic enthusiasm. The tone can be all over the place: comedic one moment, bleak the next. However, The Umbrella Academy has real affection for its lovable weirdos (in contrast to The Boys, which invites you to hate all the characters). As the story builds to a moving final twist, it is revealed that the show’s true superpower is its humanity.
Read full review
Radio TimesJun 17, 2022
Season 3 Review:
Generally speaking, these characters are interesting enough that the audience can just have fun hanging out with them, but it does lose its way every so often. Still, once The Umbrella Academy dives into the meat-and-bones of the Kugelblitz (and beyond), it kicks things into overdrive with a stunning cosmic conclusion.
Read full review
Feb 14, 2019
Season 1 Review:
It has flaws and excesses, but the series, whose first season is available on Friday, nonetheless lands in the sweet spot between comedy and drama, and between a plot-and-action-driven narrative and character exploration. ... By the time Mary J. Blige and Cameron Britton (he was serial killer Edmund Kemper on “Mindhunter”) show up as time-traveling assassins named Cha-Cha and Hazel, respectively, I was fully onboard, at least for this one season.
Read full review
Aug 14, 2020
Season 2 Review:
The violence factor is as high as the candy-colored production values, Kate Walsh returns as the dripping-evil top villain, and Ritu Arya adds snap as a sharp-talking wild card. Race and LGBTQ issues provide ballast, but for the most part “The Umbrella Academy” is just inspired bloody silliness the second time around.
Read full review
Feb 14, 2019
Season 1 Review:
The Umbrella Academy isn’t so much a puzzle that needs to be solved as a long wait for a series of explanations. At least it’s an entertaining wait. Blackman’s approach is less surreal than Way’s writing, but the density of the world-building isn’t lost. The isolated moments are often brilliant.
Read full review
Feb 13, 2019
Season 1 Review:
The story is a little too Dark Phoenix, and the series’ pacing can be maddening. But you have to love an action-packed finale that rips from a kid’s birthday party at a bowling alley (little Kenny is never getting over that one) to a concert hall on the cusp of the apocalypse. The climax is an ending and a beginning. Umbrella Academy is just getting started.
Read full review
Jul 30, 2020
Season 2 Review:
Half-baked historical consideration aside, in season two The Umbrella Academy benefits from a more honed idea of itself, both structurally and stylistically. The intrigue begins to compellingly coalesce around episode four, and many of its visual tableaux are lushly articulated bits of pop art. ... It shouldn’t work—but The Umbrella Academy barrels along fast enough that all its disparate pieces mostly stay together.
Read full review
Jun 15, 2022
Season 3 Review:
Perhaps eight episodes would have been more effective in creating a tightly coiled season with more streamlined stories and less meandering between major story turns. In the end, it feels like a very densely plotted season that doesn’t mind sacrificing the potency of emotional moments trying to pay everything off.
Read full review
Radio TimesAug 8, 2024
Season 4 Review:
Most of the individual elements you want from The Umbrella Academy are still there, embedded somewhere in the six episodes - the family drama, the irreverent soundtrack, the brutal fight scenes, the shock twists, and, of course, the looming threat of the end of the world. But, as a whole, it feels muddled and incomplete, especially as we head towards the end.
Read full review
LooperAug 8, 2024
Season 4 Review:
After three amazing seasons, "The Umbrella Academy" has an enormous amount of goodwill from fans, but the show's final season is just too short to do them justice. That said, these characters are enormously fun to hang out with, and in the end, that's almost enough.
Read full review
iJun 16, 2022
Season 3 Review:
The Umbrella Academy is an impressionistic version of what a TV show should look like, all anthropomorphic monkeys in bike gangs and angry Amish mobs (both of which have little bearing on the narrative). But the characters are so charming and likeable, the aesthetic so beguiling, that it’s almost easy to forget that you have no idea what’s going on. Or at least no longer care.
Read full review
Jul 30, 2020
Season 2 Review:
The show occasionally finds a way to harness the powers of a solid cast and tremendously talented crew to deliver moments of almost shockingly good TV, but much more frequently falls victim to dull characterizations and repetitive stylistic choices. The latter tendencies render it interchangeable with super anti-hero team-ups like Doom Patrol, The Boys or Legends of Tomorrow.
Read full review
The TelegraphJan 3, 2020
Season 1 Review:
As a production, it is incredibly stylish. Clearly a fair bit of money has been spent here. And there are enough good ideas in its multifaceted story to please some fans of the comic book – and comics in general. But if it does return for a second run, it would be nice to see some more genuinely fresh ideas – without the over-reliance on tried, tested and tired tropes from years past.
Read full review
Feb 14, 2019
Season 1 Review:
Its attempts to capture the visual and narrative virtuosity of the comics are halfhearted, though, and we’re left with a polished but increasingly dull version of the same old story: saving the world as a byproduct of overcoming adolescent resentments and family dysfunction; teenage alienation as an apocalyptic force that has to be brought under control.
Read full review
Feb 1, 2019
Season 1 Review:
It’s not that the writing is awful; it just veers a little too wildly between being needlessly vague and frustratingly ham-fisted. ... The Hargreeves family, though, is where the show shines its brightest. ... It’s not lacking plot, but in the end it’s just far too anxious about doling out answers to focus on the elements that could’ve made it great.
Read full review
Aug 8, 2024
Season 4 Review:
The first stretch of season 4 is not only great. It delivers some of the best episodes in the entire show. That only makes it more painful when the show returns to its old vices, splitting the party too thin and juggling too many side stories simultaneously. .... Calling The Umbrella Academy finale sloppy would be a compliment. While the season’s final events would be controversial in themselves, their lack of coherence adds insult to injury.
Read full review
IndieWireJul 31, 2020
Season 2 Review:
For a show with an occasionally impressive exterior (the interplay between Klaus and Ben gets an impressive-looking added wrinkle), the emotional heartbeat underneath is largely absent. Part of that comes from being stretched thin enough that characters without a well-established core are often left flailing, but it’s mostly due to the show’s continued affinity for the reset button.
Read full review
Dec 30, 2019
Season 1 Review:
Too much of the series, though, suffers from the same grey emotional palate and cement pacing that have afflicted every other Netflix superhero show. ... Ellen Page is utterly wasted until the season’s last two episodes, by which point Umbrella Academy has squandered most of the goodwill its occasional bursts of stylistic inspiration have generated.
Read full review
Jun 21, 2022
Season 3 Review:
The show descends from its second-season cliffhanger into an ever-more-convoluted world of shifting timelines, battling super-teams and existential dangers, presented with plenty of goofy humor and irreverence but as the strange new elements pile up, increasingly aimed at what feels like a hardy band of loyalists with the patience to keep pace.
Read full review
Aug 8, 2024
Season 4 Review:
Cutting Season 4 down to six episodes should have resulted in much tighter plotting, Netflix bloat be damned, yet some aspects of this final chapter still feel rather drawn out, which all leads to an abrupt end that goes for the heartstrings but tugged on my patience instead.
Read full review
Aug 8, 2024The PlaylistJun 21, 2022
Season 3 Review:
For a show featuring an openly trans hero, a drunk who communicates with the dead, a time-traveling senior citizen in the body of a 15-year-old, a half-man/half-ape with a heart of gold, and various other colorful characters, this is a show scared to really break new ground and relies on the illusion of change.
Read full review
ColliderAug 8, 2024
Season 4 Review:
Season 4 offers so little in the form of closure, and instead of bringing the characters together, it scatters them apart into odd pairings, forgets about the events of the past, and feels painfully disjointed, relying on the talent of the actors and the chemistry they have together to keep it going.
Read full review
The GuardianJul 31, 2020
Season 2 Review:
It may come on like Avengers: Age of Ultron, all fatuous fisticuffs and inscrutable nonsense, plus a nice line in mock-heroic subversion of the Marvel/DC franchise à la The Tick, but The Umbrella Academy’s real appeal is like that of The Royal Tennenbaums, The Sopranos or Tracy from Coronation Street.
Read full review
Jul 31, 2020
Season 2 Review:
The Umbrella Academy does have some senses of style and humor, which help distract from the yawning chasm of nonsense lurking in its core. But nearly every aspect of the show would be stronger if any of its logical boundaries had any weight at all, if there were any consistency to the realm of what is and is not possible in its world.
Read full review
RogerEbert.comFeb 14, 2019
Feb 13, 2019
Season 1 Review:
There’s not much else going on here, beyond some admirable if too strenuous attempts by the actors to breathe life into the show. It is packed with talent, but except for Gallagher’s time-traveling Max Fischer vibe, somehow none of it quite shines as it has every right to--save for the mid-20th-century-inflected production design and art direction (credited to a team of four), and Jeff Russo’s old-fashioned score.
Read full review
Feb 1, 2019
Season 1 Review:
It’s soundtracked by “ironic” peppy pop music, the clearest sign a show is more interested in maintaining a pose than in showing us something we haven’t seen before. ... After a while, endless stylization for its own sake comes to feel cluttered and, worst of all, dull.
Read full review
Feb 14, 2019
Season 1 Review:
Netflix already has A Series of Unfortunate Events and could have easily titled The Umbrella Academy, its new series, A Series of Pointless Scenes. ... It probably doesn't help that the writing is superficial and the acting suboptimal, or that the whole thing relies on an ostensible quirkiness and viewers' innate sense that they've seen echoes of this many other places.
Read full review
Current TV Shows
By MetascoreBy User Score