Halle Bush shines in a role that should rightly launch a career. But the all-female team of show creators, including author Naomi Alderman herself, give it a whole-hearted treatment with smart visual storytelling and made room for the characters to feel real and emphatic rather than functionary. The book was incredibly popular the star power of Toni Collette at the top of the bill would have drawn in viewers on its own. This was never going to be an easy book to adapt, and it would have been easy to hit a nice gentle ground ball of a 1:1 adaptation. Slowly the scales shift as each of our focus characters becomes more confident and controlled in their powers, stepping forward into roles previously, implicitly forbidden to them. And in Lagos, Tunde (Toheeb Jimoh), an aspiring journalist, breaks the story his female colleague discovered - of women coming together in secret to hone their newfound powers. In Moldova, the ultra-objectified trophy wife of the tyrannical president, Tatiana Moskalev (Zrinka Cvitesic), seizes the reins. In the American Midwest, Allie (Halle Bush), a Black seventeen-year-old in an abusive foster care situation, is visited by a guiding voice (Adina Porter) in her head as she navigates the perilous and violent path toward agency, dignity, and leadership. In Seattle, Mayor Margot Cleary-Lopez (Toni Collette) tries to get out ahead of the phenomenon, becoming the face of the disturbances as a political question, while her therapist husband, Rob ( John Leguizamo), and rebellious daughter, Jos (Auli’I Cravalho, otherwise known as the voice of Moana), are both caught up in the escalating clues around the crises. In London, Roxy (Ria Zmitrowicz), the hard-as-nails, unacknowledged daughter of a mob boss (Eddie Marsan), comes into her powers following a personal tragedy and uses them to upset the man-dominated order that’s keeping her confined. With an ensemble cast headlined by the wonderful Toni Collette, The Power tells a story that dots the globe, from Nigeria to Eastern Europe to London to Seattle. Societal power changes hands in a visceral and dramatic way.Īnd the show gets it. That is to say, one of the most powerless and vulnerable groups of people in the world, teenage girls in a patriarchal society, suddenly become incredibly dangerous and authoritative. It sounds a bit hokey - a bit X-Men-like - on the surface, but the book’s grounded realism makes the story feel less comic book and more brutally relatable.
The basic premise is this: Teenage girls suddenly gain the power to control electrical energy generated within their own bodies and released to devastating and world-shaking consequences. The Power was a blockbuster bestseller when it arrived seven years ago, with its core concept not precisely novel but brilliantly executed.
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