I liked the 1st episode well enough, but haven't gotten back to the rest of the series yet.

I'll watch it when it gets to Netflix.

I'm 3 episodes in, and it's watchable, but such a pale copy of the original that I don't know why they bothered. I'd say that most of the major characters are horribly miscast and/or directed - Walker, Johnny Royalle, Wolf and especially Deena Pilgrim

I've just read some of the reviews on IMDB. General consensus is (a) the pilot was terrible (certainly agree with that), but the series gets better from around ep3 onwards, and (b) overall, it isn't that good (so far, agree with that as well).

Series gets better from ep3? Well, in a sense. The pilot and 2nd episode were dreadful, and ep3 was a little better.

However, after 4 episodes they have raised the game to the extent that it's absolute car crash TV. The acting, right across the board, is absolutely appalling - it would be unfair to single anyone out because pretty much everyone in the show gives a performane so wooden that your visualise them going through varnishing rather than make-up.

The special FX are abysmal - absolutely laughably bad: Zora's light cubes work OK, but flying, "powers transfer" and Wolf blood sprays are just so bad they invite derision. Even the fight choreography is pitifully poor, not just in the super power effects (being punched or thrown across a room, for example), but even characters standing and punching each other are utterly unbelievable.

This would seem pretty bad in isolation - after seeing what can be done with Daredevil and Jessica Jones, it's just embarassing. The guy playing Johnny Royale is now looking better in comparison - he does actually appear to have acted before, whereas the rest of the case seem to have just wandered onto the set and proceeded to read their lines from an autocue.

I've had a look on IMDB at some of the actors bios, and I am genuinely amazed that several of them have had long careers prior to this - if I had been told that this was their first acting experience, I would have had no trouble believingt it.

Yep, to both of those. I'm a huge Eddie Izzard fan, but he's just not believable - he's not really playing a character, he's basically Eddie Izzard chatting when he's urbane Wolf, Eddie Izzard covered in red paint for psycho Wolf, and some pudgy guy who's never seen a fight in the fight scenes. It's not helped by the dreadful dialogue he has to spout as urbane Wolf. Forbes has been incredibly wooden - I'm not sure whether it's because she's trying to portray the aloof nature of this A-league hero character, but it just comes across as really stiff and unbelievable.

Noah Taylor has grown on me, a bit (thought the constant smoking is making me heave). Olesya Rulin is slightly more believable than some of the others, though her character is highly unlikeable (probably being set up for a redemptive arc). Max Fowler as Male Whiney Teenager is dreadful. Andrew Sensenig as Triphammer is dreadful. Sharlto Copley as Walker is so, so bad it really impacts on the whole show - he appears to have two facial expression: manic grin and constipated, which he alternates through, sometimes in line with what's happening to his character. Susan Heyward is playing some junior cop character - I don't know who it's supposed to be, because it bears absolutely no resemblance to the character Deena Pilgrim, though it shares the same name - she's both a foul up and also trying to be hard-ass and it's just not coming off at all.

I'm no expert, but I think the directing has to take a lot of the blame - character interactions are so wildly implausible in the way that they're acting, that it can't all be the actors fault, and the fight scenes are so amazingly bad that the direction and choreography has to take a lot of the blame.

The production values are awful - not just the incredibly bad FX, but also some of the sets are really unbelievable (especially the outside of the detention facility), and the costuming on the powered characters: I get that the wannabes will be wearing stuff they've made themselves and should look bad, but even the real powers look dreadful. As to the FX... my particular favourites so far are (1) the ludicrous amounts of highly unrealistic "blood" that are sprayed everywhere when Wolf feeds (seriously, it looks like every character contains a pressure washer loaded with 20 gallons of thin red paint) and especially (2) where Retro Girl flies up straight up into the sky, and you see a red motion blur character zoom straight up... but the actor is clearly left standing on the ground after her animated FX version has already flown into the sky, and both are visible at the same time before the actor is erased from the scene.

Finished the series. It's kind of an OK watch overall, but a pretty pale imitation of the original book, and looks very weak compared to the recent Daredevil and Jessica Jones series on Netflix