I’ll just come right out and say it: Jean Smart deserves all the flowers. Audiences everywhere have fallen in love with the Emmy-winning comedy Hacks and Smart’s ascerbic, quick-witted Las Vegas comic Deborah Vance, and rightfully so.
But hr brilliance extends far beyond the hit HBO series. I could point to her delightful performance as Charlene in the classic sitcom Designing Women, her formidable turn as first lady Martha Logan in 24, or her mafia-flavored bravado in season 2 of Noah Hawley’s celebrated Fargo anthology.
I’m not going to talk about any of these shows. Today’s focus is on the series that officially introduced Smart to today’s fast-paced, genre-obsessed TV landscape. The avid comic book readers know where this is going. When it premiered in 2017, CNET described the show as a “kaleidoscope of Marvel madness.” Allow me to introduce you to Legion.
Hawley is the creator behind the Marvel series. The show, which ran for three seasons from 2017 to 2019 on FX, follows a troubled man named David Haller (played by Dan Stevens), who is diagnosed with schizophrenia. He finds himself in a psychiatric institution and forges a special bond with a fellow patient named Sydney Barrett (played by Rachel Keller in her debut on-screen role).
Haller’s mental condition is the emotional conduit for the audience and his relationship with Sydney is the foundation for everything that follows. The duo is soon transferred to Summerland, a different sort of institution. Smart’s Melanie Bird is the psychiatrist who keeps the place running. Considering this is a comic book series, it’s revealed that Haller isn’t just dealing with a mental health crisis. He also has powerful psychic abilities he can’t control because, as it turns out, he is the son of Professor X. Yes, that Professor X.
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Jean Smart as Melanie Bird in the FX comic book series Legion.
As Haller soon discovers, his abilities are highly coveted and exist at the center of a power struggle. Bird and the other folks at Summerland make it their mission to rehabilitate the man who would later become known as Legion, and position him as their newest in Bird’s powerful — yet underdog — gang of New Mutants.
If you’re wondering (and you’re reading this, so you probably are), Legion is an anomaly. Shows like this rarely get greenlit anymore, so the fact that it had three seasons is a gift in and of itself. It’s a trippy treasure of a series that tackled grief and trauma through a superhero TV show lens years before Disney Plus did it with WandaVision.
Legion is technically a Marvel series, but it’s also an X-Men spinoff that exists outside of the MCU banner. Aside from Haller, who comes from The New Mutants comics, every other character featured here was an original creation not tied to the aforementioned subject matter. This creative choice freed things up, allowing Hawley to expand on concepts introduced in the comic books without being married to the rules, lore or canon.
Every episode of the show disrupted what I expected from the sci-fi genre. Smart’s addition to the cast only furthered that vibe and led to a new era of play and character exploration for the actor. Legion marks the first time Smart delved into a project like this after roughly five decades in front of the camera,
“It’s different from anything I’ve ever done,” she revealed to The Hollywood Reporter in 2017. “I think it’s safe to say it’s different from anything any of these actors have ever done. It’s even different from what most people have seen on television.”
Legion is an ensemble achievement, a detail you can find with most of Hawley’s work, and I think the cast is phenomenal. Aubrey Plaza, Bill Irwin, Jeremie Harris, Amber Midthunder, Hamish Linklater and Jemaine Clement all step out of their creative comfort zones and absolutely shine. It’s clear they had fun playing make-believe in the mind-altering world Hawley created.
At the time, Downton Abbey alum Dan Stevens and Plaza (the deadpan standout from Parks and Rec) were mainly mentioned in conversations, speculative pieces and review articles published about Legion. In retrospect, I feel compelled to acknowledge this series as the springboard for Smart’s career renaissance (sorry, Fargo).
Smart, as the actor, and Bird, as the character, served a vital purpose for both the rag-tag crew in this offbeat Marvel story world and me, your intrepid, avid TV viewer, in the real world at home. Because, really, Legion was unlike any other TV show on the air at the time, and there haven’t been many like it since.
Legion tackled issues like mental health and childhood trauma.
It explored heavy issues, such as mental health and childhood trauma, while regularly traveling through time and visiting the astral plane. Bird was the show’s narrative overseer, the figurehead mentor for the troubled mutants on screen, who led the Summerland crew with a poignant mix of vulnerability and gravitas.
For me, she brought the level-headed energy needed to sustain weekly viewing of this delightfully bonkers journey. Eight years later, all three seasons of Legion are available to binge-watch on Hulu. After I put the final punctuation mark on this paragraph, I may do just that. I suggest you do, too.
