Season Review: Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man Season One
Spider-Man is a character that really needs no introduction, least of all in the medium of animation. He’s been in it for over half a century, which is longer than most, and plenty of those have gone on to be some of the most iconic pieces of superhero media, whether as serious writing, as memes, or sometimes both. As such, it’s a bit surprising that he’s gone this long without a series that was made specifically for a streaming service, but he finally got that with the latest installment, Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man, which you may also be surprised to learn is NOT the longest title for one of these shows. Incidentally, that honor goes to the OTHER Spider-Man show loosely based on one of the live action movies, Spider-Man: The New Animated Series. Like that short-lived series, which took place after the first Sam Raimi movie from 2002, YFNSM takes place in an alternate version of the ongoing Marvel Cinematic Universe, with the main point of divergence being that instead of Tony Stark mentoring Peter, it’s his usual nemesis Norman Osborn, played by two time Oscar Nominee Coleman Domingo. Or at least, that’s where it landed after a few different creative tweaks along the way. So how is the finished product?
Well, I think I might be in the minority on this based on other reviews I’ve seen, but I still haven’t quite gotten used to the blend of comic book aesthetics on full CGI characters that they use here. I’ve seen a lot of great full CGI shows, including ones adapting comic characters, but something about this specific style tends to take me out of even the most dramatic and well acted scene from time to time. I bring this up first mainly because visuals are really where one makes a first impression with animated series, but it’s by far the biggest critique I have with YFNSM overall. A smaller critique I have is with the release schedule, which threw out together two to three episodes a week and basically made the season feel like it swung by in a flash. This is not helped by the fact that this is the shortest first season a Spider-Man cartoon has ever had, and boy howdy does it feel like it. It feels like we get basically the bare minimum of episodes to set up Peter’s usual conundrum of balancing personal and hero life, the complications of the former and lethal dangers of the latter, along with how those he cares about are dragged into it whether voluntarily or not, leading to a solid but not that amazing (or spectacular) resolution.
If I had to summarize this season, I would say it’s a good start. It’s easily the best season of a Spider-Man has had since the abrupt end of Spectacular Spider-Man in 2009, though the bar for that is basically in hell. It has the balls to engage with more complex and grounded topics than most of its predecessors, particularly regarding Lonnie Lincoln’s subplot, but never enough to feel like it tapped into it that much. The cameos from other superheroes don’t exactly feel like erroneous cameos, but also don’t feel like they necessarily needed those heroes for those scenes. And it’s liberal use of established Spider-Man characters is interesting, but there’s not much past the novelty of the changes, at least not yet. We’ve got at least another couple of seasons of this coming (and possibly ONLY two more if most streaming cartoons are anything to go by), but that should be enough room for them to grow and improve to hopefully fulfill this show’s full potential. So remember, true believers, with great power comes…eh, you know the rest.
