Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Extraordinary’ Season 2 On Hulu, Where Jen Tries To Find Her Powers While Her Friends’ Relationships Change

The first season of the British superhero comedy Extraordinary streamed over a year ago, but it stuck in our minds the entire time, mainly because its first season was consistently funny and told a character-driven story that didn’t lean too heavily on the superhero stuff. Will it continue that way in Season 2?

EXTRAORDINARY SEASON 2: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: Jen (Máiréad Tyers) is sleeping and lets out a little chuckle. Over her bed is scrawled the words “Jen Loves Jizz.”

The Gist: Jen is happy because it’s the night after she and Jizzlord (Luke Rollason) told each other how they feel, and Jen gets up and starts dancing. She also knows that she now has the money to go to the institute that will help her unlock her powers — she lives in a world where everyone has superpowers except her. She’s so happy at the prospect of this new beginning, she starts dancing.

She goes into the kitchen, where her roomie and bestie Carrie (Sofia Oxenham), also excited by the prospect of new beginnings, starts dancing. Then Kash (Bilal Hasna), their other roomie, starts dancing, until Carrie reminds him that they broke up the night before. Kash didn’t think the breakup was real, but Carrie thinks this shouldn’t be a sad occasion. Kash wants to use his powers to turn back time to “unring the bell,” but he can’t go back more than a few minutes.

Jizzlord is at the local grocery, picking up a few things, when a kid points at him and says to his mom that he looks like his dad. Nora (Rosa Robson), the kid’s mom, recognizes him right away; it’s her husband, who went missing the first time he turned into a cat. Jizzlord runs back to the flat and hides in the bathtub.

Jen and Carrie go to the institute to pay and get Jen’s treatment started. She meets her “powers coach” George (Julian Barrett), whom Carrie calls a DILF. They start immediately, with George and her literally entering her mind (that’s his superpower). It’s a cluttered mess in there, but Jen is excited to start the journey of trying to clear the blockage that’s keeping her from discovering her power.

At the party shop where Jen works, Nora comes around with posters looking for her husband, Robert Clutton. Of course, Jen recognizes the photo right away. So Jen knows, and Jizzlord knows, but they don’t know that each other knows.

In the meantime, Carrie is looking to clean house, including a new wardrobe (she channels Princess Diana for advice), and she decides to take everything to The Void, a black hole that people toss their unwanted stuff into. It includes a pair of Kash’s underwear that he doesn’t want to let go of. The two of them then start breakup negotiations, complete with a contract. Included is the timeline for him to move out of the flat.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Take Starstruck and mix it with The Boys, and you’ve got Extraordinary.

Our Take: One of the things that made the first season of Extraordinary so fun is that creator Emma Moran didn’t send the story in a million different directions. Jen wanted to find out what her power was, tried to DIY it, and failed. In the meantime, she fell for Jizzlord, and Carrie and Kash started to figure out that they both wanted more out of life. Moran kept the stories focused on the main four characters, and that continues in Season 2.

She also didn’t lean too heavily on the trope of everyone having powers, and they use them for mundane reasons. The stories came out of the main characters’ personalities, with their powers being used as comedic seasoning. For instance, Carrie only channels the dead in one scene in the first episode, but it’s a doozy, and it seems like she’s using it for her own use and not just so her estate attorney bosses can use her for their clients. Kash ends up using his time-jumping power at the end of the episode, but not in a way he expects.

The first episode rides on the same cast chemistry that ruled the first season, along with Tyers’ smirky deadpan performance as Jen. No matter what’s going on with the rest of the ensemble, Jen’s journey is always going to be the key to the series, and seeing her ride the highs and lows as she reaches into the mess that is her mind to find some answers is going to be fun, as will how she and Jizzlord negotiate their relationship knowing that he left behind a family after he turned into a cat.

Sex and Skin: None.

Parting Shot: Jen and Jizzlord visit Nora. Jen gets assurances that Jizz isn’t hiding anything else, but when his son runs into his arms, Jizz says, “oh, there’s one more thing.” Then, in a mid-credits sequence, Carrie, who cut off her bangs and threw them into The Void, stands on line for a “hair fixer”, whose superpower is to fix bad haircuts.

Sleeper Star: Like before the first season, we’ll put Luke Rollason in this category, simply because it gives us another opportunity to type the word “Jizzlord.” We also like Darcey Porter-Cassidy as Ange, Jen’s boss at the party shop, because her power is looking like a preteen, despite being middle-aged, with the commensurate life experience.

Most Pilot-y Line: None we could find.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Extraordinary continues to mine humor from well-written characters and a finely-tuned ensemble, using its superhero conceit only occasionally.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.