Rejoice, international viewers! DC Universe’s Titans is now streaming on Netflix International!
The DC Universe streaming site and app is great for a lot of things — binge watching old favorites like Batman: The Animated Series and Justice League: Unlimited, reading a fairly large amount of comics, watching the latest DC Animated feature films, and rediscovering just how much I love the new superhero teams of Young Justice: Outsiders and Titans.
Unfortunately, one of the things it wasn’t great for was providing all that lovely content for the many international DC fans, as the steaming site is currently only available for those of us residing in the U.S.
And while the majority of the content on DC Universe is still only available to fans within the U.S., today fans around the world will get the chance to meet all the fantastic characters of Titans.
And, while those of you living outside the U.S. did have to wait a few extra months to see the show, you also get the benefit of not having to wait week by week for the show.
Instead, you’ll be able to watch all eleven episodes at once — and then wait an agonizingly long time with the rest of us for the second season.
Here are five reasons you should start out the new year with DC Universe’s first live action original tv show!
It’s perfectly binge-able
There are tons of shows that have hung around on my ‘to-watch’ list for far too long for no other reason than that catching up on them — with their three to five 22 episode-long seasons — just seems like such a monumental task.
Fortunately, Titans first season is a mere 11 episodes — each around 40 minutes long. Which means you’ll be able to easily immerse yourself in the stories of the four core members and come along on their respective journeys in the course of a single week — or weekend, depending on how you like to budget your time.
Titans does a great job with each of its individual episodes, with the self-contained episodes that only lightly touch the overall season arc being among the best of the season.
Each episode has its own unique mood and atmosphere to it — the more Rachel-focused episodes feel like something out of a horror movie, while Dick’s standalone episodes run either detective noir or straight up comic book goodness.
There’s plenty of fantastic action, comic book easter eggs and strong character-driven moments to keep you wanting more, and I bet you’ll be halfway through the season before you even realize that almost six hours have passed.
The found family feels are real
Titans keeps its team members apart for a few of the early episodes, making sure to give us just enough to become interested in them (or, in the case of Kory Anders, utterly devoted to) before quickly bringing the whole team together.
And as great as each of the individual Titans are, the show understands that we’re here to watch a show about a superhero team and obliges us nicely.
The first two heroes to meet are Rachel and Dick, and it takes Dick about an entire scene before he goes ahead and basically becomes a certified dad. For a guy who starts the show out by saying “fuck Batman,” he sure does follow pretty closely in his estranged mentor’s footsteps — collecting orphaned children, helping them and doing everything that he can to protect them.
From there, the rest of the Titans eventually come together, and they very quickly become a pretty damn functional family of outcasts and misfit superheroes.
In fact, the first season of Titans is really less of a superhero team-up show than it is a show about a bunch of lost and lonely individuals coming together to form a makeshift family in the wreckage of their broken and forgotten lives.
So if that sounds like it’s right up your alley, then Titans is absolutely the show for you.
It’s a DC fan’s dream
Titans leans hard into the fact that it’s a show on a DC streaming site. I don’t just mean in terms of it’s violence, horror elements or adult themes (although it does take full advantage of those, too), but in the fact that it’s able and willing to play in the DC comics proverbial sandbox of characters and history.
It doesn’t just give us little snippets of easter eggs — sly winks to the audience that hint at the existence of broader universe.
Instead, it drops us full into the world of DC comics. Dick Grayson might scroll pass Donna Troy’s name in the second episode, but in the eighth episode she shows up as a major character for a multiple episode run.
Fan favorite characters like Jason Todd get entire episodes to interact with our main heroes, while more obscure heroes like Hawk and Dove and Robotman and the Doom Patrol likewise get their own prolonged moments in the show’s spotlight.
And that end of the season post-credits scene? Holy shit, I get tingly just thinking about it.
Anna Diop as Kory Anders/Starfire
There are plenty of people who would put Anna Diop’s Starfire at number one on this list, and they’d be absolutely right to do so.
I would, too, if it weren’t for that while as badass as Anna Diop was this season, and as great as all her scenes were (and they were all fantastic), she was still relatively underutilized.
It makes sense, seeing as the narrative centered around Rachel Roth and the major character arc for the season belonged to Dick Grayson (more on that in a moment). Still, she was so electric and engaging every moment that she was on screen that it’s my deepest and most sincere hope that the second season will belong to her — both in terms of plot and character.
But while we wait for that second season (set to start filming this month!), you can become acquainted will the truly badass, beautiful and deadly Kory Anders in Titans season one. Forgive the terrible pun, but for a character whose superhero name is Starfire, the only way to describe Kory in this show is cool.
Everything about her is just so damn awesome — from the way Gar and Rachel immediately recognize her ultimate authority, to the fact that Dick Grayson takes about .2 seconds to regard her as an equal and a partner, to even the way that she walks.
I spent every episode that she was in this season wondering if I wanted to be her, or if I wanted to marry her, and honestly, I’m still not sure which one I’d want to pick.
Brenton Thwaites as Dick Grayson/Robin
As much as I love Kory — and clearly, from all the time I spent gushing over her in this article and so many of my Titans reviews, I love her a whole lot — I have to say that Brenton Thwaites work as Dick Grayson is the best reason to watch Titans (as well as just my personal favorite thing about Titans season 1).
Brenton Thwaites is just such a superbly talented actor, able to easily slip from being a dark and bloody vigilante, to a gentle and caring father figure, to a wry and gently teasing best friend, and then to a powerful and authoritative team leader all in one episode
Dick Grayson has shouldered the weight of the emotional storytelling of this season, and Brenton Thwaites pulled it all off magnificently. I don’t feel like I’m exaggerating in the least when I say that this season of Titans would not have been half as successful had it not been for the tremendous job that he did playing a Dick Grayson who is searching for who he is and what he wants his life to be post-Robin.
And he’s not just good at his role as Dick Grayson — he’s the kind of good that makes everyone else better, too. He can play off every single person in the show — with his chemistry with Kory and his paternal care for Rachel being the standouts — easily making you believe in their characters and his relationship with them.
I’ve been in the DC fandom long enough now to have seen a countless number of fancasts of Dick Grayson through the years, but with Brenton’s work in this role, it’ll be incredibly difficult for me to see anyone but him as the boy wonder.
If you watch the show for no other reason, then let it be to see Brenton Thwaites take on the mantle of the erstwhile Robin and soon-to-be Nightwing. It’s totally worth it.
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