Naomi S01 720p AMZN WEB-DL DDP5.1 H.264-NTb

The show will follow a teen girl's journey from her small northwestern town to the heights of the multiverse. When a supernatural event shakes her hometown to the core, Naomi sets out to uncover its origins, and what she discovers will challenge everything we believe about our heroes.

Genre: Drama, Action, Adventure
Stars: Kaci Walfall

The CW's 'Naomi': TV Review

Ava DuVernay's new DC Comics adaptation focuses on a young woman with a Superman obsession who may, in fact, be pretty super herself.

BY DANIEL FIENBERG
JANUARY 11, 2022 6:45AM

In perhaps the most "e;No duh"e; slice of voiceover ever written, The CW's Naomi begins with its main character opining, "e;Every superhero has an origin story and this is mine."e;

Since Arrow launched in 2012, The CW has given us origin stories for quite literally hundreds of superheroes and villains, generally built on similarly paced introductions of characters, powers and obstacles. The primary takeaway from the early episodes of Naomi, developed by Ava DuVernay from the DC property by Brian Michael Bendis and David F. Walker, is that despite the proliferation of the formula, there are still origin stories we haven't seen - or at least types of heroes who haven't had their stories told.

That doesn't exactly make Naomi revelatory, but it points to some of the ways this deliberately presented origin story is just fresh enough to keep you curious through all of the ways that the first two episodes are clumsy.

The title of the comic and series should tell you something about where Naomi is putting its focus. Naomi McDuffie (Kaci Walfall) will eventually become the character known as Powerhouse, but the series isn't about a down-the-road costumed alter ego. For now, Naomi is a likably nerdy high-school girl with a likably nerdy group of friends. Naomi runs one of the world's most popular Superman fan sites, a fact that even the popular kids at her school inexplicably think is cool.

In this world, it's conventional wisdom that Superman isn't real, but Naomi is intrigued by him because, like the Man of Steel, she's adopted - and thanks to her thoroughly loving military-affiliated parents (Barry Watson and Mouzam Makkar), she has traveled from home to home, always the new girl and frequently the only Black girl in her school.

She relates to Superman as a perpetual outsider, but guess what? She's about to find other reasons to relate. The town is about to get shaken to its core because one afternoon Superman shows up in the main square, battles a big blue alien, causes a reasonable amount of damage and flies away. Seemingly the only person in town who missed out on Superman's appearance is Superman superfan Naomi, because as she got close to the action, Naomi started hearing strange noises and passed out.

It's quickly clear that something strange and potentially hugely powerful is happening with Naomi - something that in some way involves skulking tattoo artist Dee (Alexander Wraith), skulking used car dealer Zumbado (Cranston Johnson) and yellowed newspaper clippings about a previous unexplained phenomenon in town 17 years earlier.

The CW has been promoting Naomi with clips from very late in the pilot (written by DuVernay and Jill Blankenship and directed by Amanda Marsalis) and subsequent episodes, pointing to how little urgency the series has when it comes to establishing the main character's superhero identity. This pacing matches the early installment of the comic and points to what I said about the title. Naomi wants you to get to know Naomi, her obsessive insecurities, her idyllically warm parents and her circle of friends, before it wants you to be invested in what heightened abilities she has.

With Marsalis setting the tone, there's some kinetic momentum to Naomi, coming not from whether or not the main character can manipulate energy or possesses enhanced hearing but from the skateboard that represents her primary mode of transportation. Naomi idolizes a man who can fly, but the skateboard is presented as the way that she can fly herself, a visual freedom that helps the series establish local and high school geography in zippy, unedited takes, all accompanied by an upbeat soundtrack. The skateboarding sequences are pleasant distractions from all the levels on which, as a superhero show, Naomi will disappoint anybody who wants high-octane action or standout visual effects.

In its first two episodes, Naomi might actually be closer to Nancy Drew than the various Arrowverse shows, at least in The CW terms. It's mostly long chunks of exposition, interrupted in contrived ways, followed by detective work with Naomi's Scooby Gang, which includes best friend Annabelle (Mary-Charles Jones) and Naomi's dueling love interests, fellow military brat Nathan (Daniel Puig) and townie Anthony (Will Meyers). And because any old chump series can introduce a love triangle in its opening hours, Naomi goes full love-square with Lourdes (Camila Moreno), the flirty girl from the comic store whom even Naomi appears to understand she should really be with.

Everything the Scooby Gang is investigating feels perfunctory - bizarrely overlit office break-ins, inertly dark poking-around at Ye Olde Mill - and I'm going to go so far as to say that nothing that happens early in Naomi is really all that fun or interesting. What makes the show work is that all of the central performances are gawky and charming and, for the most part, less CW-polished than I would have expected, in a good way. There isn't a standout performance, other than Walfall's appealing lead turn, but the bickering and loose bantering is all quite natural.

Both of Naomi's skulking allies/adversaries are compelling presences, if not really characters. Wraith, whose real name could probably double for that of a DC baddie, has an intriguing, hulking woodenness that makes sense in context. Johnson is enjoying playing one of the best-dressed figures of the young TV year, which doesn't mean that his pervasive menace amounts to a real threat. You're supposed to have some doubt as to which adult figures in Naomi are going to be helpful or harmful for our heroine - a fact that, in this case, gives the entire show a flimsy sense of motivation or stakes.

It's a series that so far is excelling at the little things - like everybody's joy at Naomi's mother and her smoothies or Naomi's dad's loving acceptance of whatever her sexual identity turns out to be - at the expense of the bigger things. Those are nice beats and nice details, and they're the things Naomi is choosing to emphasize, with its main character more invested in learning about her own human identity than what her secret identity could become.

Naomi doesn't do the bigger things as well, and these first two episodes aren't all that exciting or thrilling. Short-term, though, I'm willing to go along with it, and I'm content to adjust expectations for potential viewers.

General
Complete name: Naomi.S01E01.Dont.Believe.Everything.You.Think.720p.AMZN.WEB-DL.DDP5.1.H.264-NTb.mkv
Format : Matroska
Duration : 42 min 24 s

Video
Format/Info : Advanced Video Codec: Bit rate : 4 130 kb/s
Width : 1 280 pixels
Height : 720 pixels
Frame rate : 23.976 (24000/1001) FPS

Audio
Format/Info : Enhanced Audio Coding 3
Bit rate : 640 kb/s
Channel(s) : 6 channels
Language : English

Subtitles : English, English SDH

Screens