Invincible’s Long Episode Runtimes Are Both a Gift and a Major Flaw

[Editor’s note: The following contains spoilers through the Season 1 finale of Invincible, “Where I Really Come From.”]

At first glance, the TV adaptation of Invincible may feel a bit redundant when watched in 2021. After all, didn’t we just get another ultra-violent and gory TV show with The Boys, also on Amazon Prime? But, based on Robert Kirkman‘s comic book series, Invincible takes a much different approach to exploring superheroics compared to the nihilistic The Boys, by taking inspiration from brightly-colored character-driven comics from the ’60s. Also, what makes the show unique is its format — this is an hour-long superhero show that is also animated.

For as long as there have been animated shows on television, they’ve been half an hour in length. Mainly because animation still carries a stigma of being considered entertainment for kids, and shows aimed at kids tend to run shorter and because adult animation has (for the most part) stuck to the sitcom formula, which usually relies on the 30-minute runtime. Even in the era of streaming, which has allowed filmmakers to experiment with format, animated shows (comedy or otherwise) have still remained under the 40-minute mark, until Invincible.

Invincible centers on a teenage boy named Mark (Steven Yeun) who one day discovers he has superpowers. He also discovers that his dad (J. K. Simmons) happens to be this world’s answer to Superman. The 2003 comic was a stark contrast to the stories being told by DC and Marvel in the early ’00s, as it brought back character-driven drama and a focus on the mundane that was more common in the ’60s. This is to say that it’s not a huge surprise to see Kirkman talk of the show more as a prestige drama than a superhero show.

When discussing the runtime of the show, Kirkman recently told Collider, “I wanted [Invincible] to feel like an hour-long cable drama. We wanted this just to feel different. This is an animated series and most animated series are 22-minutes, and we wanted it to stand apart.” As Kirkman argues, the increased runtime allows Invincible to give a bigger focus to character drama than a plot-focused 22-minute show, which together with the more serious tone and the amount of violence and gore in the show, make it more similar to something like The Walking Dead than Justice League Unlimited.

That’s not inherently a bad thing. After all, even before the streaming era, shows like The Venture Bros. had already experimented with longer runtimes for special episodes in order to build more drama during season premieres or finales. More recently, the new Star Wars: The Bad Batch premiered with a 72-minute episode. Having animated shows with longer runtimes can certainly help destigmatize the medium in the eyes of the general audience that still thinks of animation as inherently for kids, the same way more mature and violent anime during the ’90s helped kids at the time learn that there were more cartoons out there than what they watched on Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network. The key is to justify the runtime with the story itself, rather than use it as a way to make audiences think of your show as something it is not, because then it runs the risk of becoming a gimmick.

Amazon’s Invincible doesn’t really have an answer for why it needs a longer runtime, and that’s where its problems begin, because it ends up decompressing a tight story into a mishmash of random subplots and drawn-out moments that somehow still feel rushed despite having time to waste. Unlike the MCU or The Boys, which radically changes its source material in substantial ways, the show has mostly been a faithful recreation of the comic by Kirkman, Cory Walker, and Ryan Ottley, both in terms of their bright and colorful pages, and also the story being told. Normally this wouldn’t be an issue — the DC animated movies based on single graphic novels or storylines have been mostly successful adaptations — but Invincible is forced to decompress fewer than 30 pages in order to fill around 45 minutes of story.

As Kirkman said, this allows the show to expand on certain characters’ stories, like Mark’s mom, Debbie (Sandra Oh). Rather than being a passive side-character, she now gets a bigger and more substantial role as she starts unraveling the mystery of who killed the superhero team Guardians of the Globe and reckons with the huge discoveries she makes herself. If this was the case with all the show’s many, many subplots, or if the show was more of an ensemble, then there wouldn’t be a problem. Except Invincible is not an ensemble, and rather than develop Mark’s character and immediate world, the show often ends up spending too much time on smaller and unconnected subplots that feel completely trivial to the main focus of the episode.

Take Robot’s story (Zachary Quinto), which we see as the B story for most of the season, culminating in the reveal that Robot has built a new human body for himself in the seventh episode of the season. That is a huge revelation that comes with its fair share of ramifications, both ethical and practical (since he took the DNA of a fellow superhero to make his own body). Still, the reveal comes smack in the middle of the emotional climax to Mark’s story with his father. This makes spending time with the Robot subplot a chore rather than an engaging character study, as we are robbed of the main story at the worst possible time, without any apparent reason for why we see this storyline play out right now and not in the next season.

This extends to almost every subplot, which feel like they’re being taken from random parts of the comic (and they are, at times), and thrown in just to fill in some time. There are upsides to having more time to tell a story, and a place for animated shows to experiment with runtimes to reach a different audience, but they have to be justified by the story. Amazon’s latest superhero show has a lot going on for it, but Invincible, it is not.

Invincible Season 1 is streaming now on Amazon Prime. The show has been renewed for two more seasons.

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