A 6.1 Out of 10

The Umbrella Academy arrives on Netflix with a premise built for a comic book and a family drama built for something sadder. Created by Steve Blackman and developed by Jeremy Slater, the series is loosely based on the comic by Gerard Way and Gabriel Bá, published by Dark Horse Comics. It ran four seasons and 36 episodes, from February 15, 2019 to August 8, 2024. It is an American superhero comedy drama, and it earns every one of those three words unevenly.

Trailer, via Netflix.

43 Women Give Birth at Noon

The setup is the show’s best idea. On October 1, 1989, 43 women around the world give birth at the same moment, none of them showing any sign of pregnancy until labor began. Seven of those children are adopted by the eccentric billionaire Sir Reginald Hargreeves, played by Colm Feore, and raised as a superhero team he calls “The Umbrella Academy.” He gives them numbers instead of names. Their robot mother, Grace, later names six of them: Luther, Diego, Allison, Klaus, Ben, and Vanya.

That last name matters, and so does the show’s handling of it. Elliot Page plays Vanya Hargreeves, later Viktor Hargreeves, also known as the White Violin. Reginald keeps Viktor apart from the others’ crime-fighting, claiming he shows no powers of his own. The first season turns on that lie.

A Funeral, Then the Apocalypse

Season one is set in the present day and opens on a reunion no one wants. Luther, part ape, has spent four years on the Moon. Allison is a famous actress. Viktor is a violinist. Klaus is a drug addict. Diego has become a vigilante. Five disappeared seventeen years earlier. Ben is dead, a ghost who can speak only to Klaus.

Then Reginald dies, the estranged siblings gather for the funeral, and Five returns from the future with the news that a global apocalypse is imminent. Aidan Gallagher plays Five, and he is the engine of the first season. Time-travelling Commission operatives Hazel and Cha-Cha chase him. The siblings dig into their father’s life. Their dysfunctional relationships strain and hold and strain again.

The second season scatters them in Dallas in the early 1960s. Five lands on November 25, 1963, minutes before a nuclear doomsday tied to JFK not being assassinated, and with Hazel’s help travels back ten days. The show keeps moving its pieces around the board. It rarely lets them sit still long enough to feel like people.

The Cast Carries What the Plot Drops

Netflix confirmed Page’s casting on November 9, 2017. Tom Hopper, David Castañeda, Emmy Raver-Lampman, Robert Sheehan and Aidan Gallagher joined as the rest of the siblings on November 30, 2017. Mary J. Blige came aboard as the assassin Cha-Cha on February 12, 2018, and Colm Feore joined as Reginald on February 16, 2018, alongside Cameron Britton, Adam Godley and Ashley Madekwe.

Justin H. Min and Kate Walsh were promoted to series regulars for season two in January 2020. Ritu Arya, Marin Ireland and Yusuf Gatewood joined in September 2019. The Sparrow Academy arrived for season three with Justin Cornwell, Britne Oldford, Genesis Rodriguez, Cazzie David and Jake Epstein. Megan Mullally, Nick Offerman and David Cross joined season four in February 2023.

The adaptation had a long road. Universal Pictures optioned it as a film in 2011, shelved it, and Netflix greenlit the series in July 2017. It was filmed in Toronto and Hamilton, Ontario. In April 2019, Netflix reported that 45 million households watched season one in its first month, making it one of the most-streamed series of that year.

That number is a measure of reach, not of quality. The second season followed on July 31, 2020, the third on June 22, 2022, and the fourth on August 8, 2024.

What Actually Works

Robert Sheehan’s Klaus is the show’s most alive creation. A drug addict who can talk to the dead and mostly wishes he couldn’t, Klaus gets the jokes and the grief, and Sheehan plays both without asking for sympathy. Justin H. Min’s Ben, visible only to Klaus, turns a ghost into a conscience. Their scenes together are the closest The Umbrella Academy comes to real intimacy.

Emmy Raver-Lampman’s Allison and Tom Hopper’s Luther carry the family’s oldest wounds. David Castañeda’s Diego is a vigilante with a chip on his shoulder and a decent arc under it. Ritu Arya’s Lila Pitts arrives as a complication and stays as one.

The show’s structure is its problem. Every season builds to an apocalypse, and every apocalypse resets the board. The siblings learn, then forget. The stakes rise, then rewind. By the later seasons, the pattern is visible enough that tension leaks out of it.

The tone wobbles too. The comedy and the drama are both real, but they don’t always share a scene well. A funeral joke lands next to a genuine loss, and the show doesn’t always know which one it wants you to feel.

The Four-Season Problem

Here is the ranking of what The Umbrella Academy does best, in order:

1. Casting. The ensemble is the reason to watch, and it holds through four seasons.
2. The premise. 43 simultaneous births and a billionaire who buys seven of them is a hook that never stops paying.
3. The first season. It is the tightest, because it has one apocalypse and no history to manage.
4. The second season. Dallas in the 1960s gives the show its best setting and its messiest plot.
5. The third season. The Sparrow Academy is a good idea that arrives too late to breathe.
6. The fourth season. It has to close a story that kept refusing to close.

That order is not a knock on the later episodes so much as a description of what happens when a show built on a reset button runs out of resets.

A 6.1 Out of 10

The Umbrella Academy is a good show that never becomes a great one. It has a cast worth the runtime, a premise worth the pitch, and a habit of undoing its own best work. Its published critical score is 6.1 out of 10, with a Metacritic figure of 61 out of 100. That is a fair verdict. It sits where the show sits: above average, below its own ambitions.

The first season is the one to keep. It knows what it is. The later seasons keep reaching for a bigger ending and keep paying for it with the smaller moments that made the family worth following.

For a series that ran 36 episodes across four seasons, the ratio of great scenes to great seasons is the whole story. The Umbrella Academy gave us Klaus and Ben, Five’s exhaustion, and a funeral that turned into a reunion. It also gave us four apocalypses and a lot of undoing. That trade is worth making once. It is not worth making four times.

Elliot Page · Netflix · Robert Sheehan · superhero drama · The Umbrella Academy · TV Review