Netflix’s superhero drama Raising Dion struggles to find a Stranger Things balance

A young hero must learn to use his exceptional powers to stop a terrible threat and save his friends, family, and possibly the entire world. It’s a pretty typical setup for a superhero origin story, but Netflix’s new series Raising Dion, which launches its nine-episode first season on October 4th, changes things up by making its hero a seven-year-old. Splicing family drama with comic-book action produces some engaging story beats, but the friction between the two genres eventually makes the show fall apart.

Raising Dion follows Nicole Warren (Alisha Wainwright), who’s left raising Dion (Ja’Siah Young) alone after his brilliant meteorologist father Mark (Michael B. Jordan of Black Panther and Creed) drowns saving a woman’s life. When Dion starts moving objects with his mind, Nicole realizes it’s really going to take a village to raise this kid, and she turns to friends, family, and more unlikely allies to help train and protect him.

While Jordan’s star power and boundless charisma is unfortunately limited to flashbacks and the occasional supernatural vision, creator / writer Carol Barbee has assembled a wonderful cast centered on the show’s charming, precocious title character. Young brings a powerful sense of joy and innocence to Dion as he discovers the extent of his powers and strives to use them to help others. He’s absolutely adorable as he sets about designing his own costume and Fortress of Solitude, which takes the form of a pillow fort in his room. The only sour note is the amount of product placement involved in his tendency to use his abilities to acquire his favorite name-brand snack foods.

Those powers add an extra layer to the traditional family-drama conflicts between Dion and Nicole who’s struggling to maintain a job and care for her son. Mark’s death has forced them to move out of a more affluent neighborhood and sent Dion to a new school where he struggles to fit in, both as a nerdy kid who loves science and comic books and as one of the few black students.

One of the show’s most poignant episodes centers on an incident where Dion uses his telekinesis to stop skater bully Jonathan (Gavin Munn) from running off with his father’s watch. In a clear sign of racial bias, the principal blames Dion for the fight, forcing Nicole to talk with her son both about using his powers responsibly and about the hard life he’s likely to have ahead of him because of his skin color.

Barbee skillfully addresses the complicated social issues around racism and single parenthood, but she brings in plenty of humor to keep the story from getting too heavy. One of the main sources of comedy is Dion’s godfather Pat (Jason Ritter) who uses his knowledge of comic books to serve as a mentor while fighting with Nicole about his tendency to spoil the kid. Dion’s classmate Esperanza (Sammi Haney), who uses a wheelchair, fuses the show’s social consciousness and silliness. She wistfully talks about the pain of being invisible to the rest of the school, while forcefully pushing herself into the role of his new best friend. She also makes sure Dion’s fortress is up to Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) standards.

These grounded, personal conflicts add depth to Raising Dion’s superhero fare, which is more boilerplate. Dion is pursued by a monster he dubs “the Crooked Man,” which is apparently killing other people with powers, in the style of Heroes’ Sylar or Sense8’s Whispers. The creature’s look appears to have been modeled after the Mind Flayer from Stranger Things, and Raising Dion also pays homage to Netflix’s smash hit about kids dealing with the supernatural by setting its theme as Pat’s ringtone. When Nicole and Pat want to understand the nature of both the threat and Dion’s abilities, they dig into Mark’s research for Biona, the science and technology company where he and Pat worked together. At times, that group seems just as shady as the various government operations running the show in Stranger Things.

In attempting to give equal time to family drama and science fiction, Barbee doesn’t fully develop either. An episode meant to establish Nicole’s complicated relationship with her older, more successful sister Kat (Jazmyn Simon) feels flat because so much character development is forced into a single episode. When push comes to shove, Kat is willing to sacrifice her career and romantic relationship for Nicole and Dion, but that loss loses its sting since so little time is spent on showing what those things mean to her.

The issue is even worse when it comes to the complexities of the superhero plot. A major twist is telegraphed early enough that it’s not particularly surprising when it happens, but Barbee never devotes the time to explaining why or how it happens, making the shift feel jarringly abrupt. It’s particularly frustrating since the first season’s final episode includes a flashback to Nicole meeting Mark, which is sweet, but it easily could have come earlier in the show, leaving space for showing why events suddenly come to a head and how the story reached this point.

The climax is also watered down by the dual mandate to have Nicole’s personal plot reach its own conclusion. It’s discordant to watch her get so excited about finally earning health insurance and rekindling her passion for dancing right as her son is being threatened by a murderous monster. Late in the season, Raising Dion brings up unusually powerful points about male entitlement and accepting boundaries. It directly confronts traditional TV plots, but, again, it’s brought up and resolved so quickly that it loses the intended impact.

Integrating personal dramas into comic-book stories is nothing new. That balance is at the heart of the CW’s slate of superhero soap operas, and it defines Peter Parker’s struggles to manage high school while he’s fighting supervillains. But the distance Raising Dion creates between the two elements by centering the story on the hero’s normal mother makes the show feel disjointed. Spider-Man’s plots can come to a head when he has to save a bus with his classmates on it, but there’s no reason for Nicole’s maybe-love-interest dance instructor to show up anywhere near the final showdown with the Crooked Man.

The mundane nature of the personal dramas in Raising Dion creates further dissonances with the big stakes of its comic-book elements. The CW shows boost soap opera drama to superhero levels work by making the personal plotlines as outsized as the action, as characters learn that close relatives are secret supervillains or time-travelers. Raising Dion is clearly trying to mimic Stranger Things with its intergenerational conflicts and focus on how relationships grow and change in the face of the unknown, but that show’s ensemble nature makes it easier to have a lot of smaller stories that only coalesce during the setpiece finish. After a decidedly underwhelming climax, Raising Dion teases its next season by setting up an even more trite cliffhanger. There’s certainly potential in the show’s premise and charming cast, and in its ambitious attempts to address issues that superhero stories normally avoid. But in order to succeed, the writers will need to find a better balance between the disparate parts.