Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Naomi’ On The CW, An Ava DuVernay-Produced Series Based On The Teenage DC Superhero

The comics world is full of people who are either alone or come to their powers alone and find a support group along the way. That is certainly how the Greg Berlanti Arrowverse series have been written. But with Naomi, The CW presents a DC-based superhero series that has a different worldview. It shows a main character, the one who discover she has powers, as someone with a pretty solid support system in her life. How does that help or hurt the show?

NAOMI: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: “We all look at the world through our own lens,” says a young woman as we see a teenager look in a mirror. “But looking isn’t the same thing as seeing. What if everything you believed about the world turned out to be wrong?” As she puts on her glasses, we see that the picture gets blurry, then clear again as the takes them off.

The Gist: Naomi McDuffie (Kaci Walfall) is a regular 16-year-old in the military town of Port Oswego, Oregon. Her parents Greg (Barry Watson), an Army major, and Jennifer (Mouzam Makkar) adopted Naomi when she was a baby, after her parents were killed in an unspecified accident. She’s an ace skateboarder and runs a blog dedicated to Superman, whom she likes because he was adopted like she was.

She also has a couple of guys who like her: Nathan (Daniel Puig), whom she broke up with after a few dates but remains close friends with, and Anthony (Will Meyers), a debate club classmate who grew up in Port Oswego and knows that military kids like Nathan don’t like “townies” like him. In the middle of a debate club practice, Naomi’s best friend Annabelle (Mary-Charles Jones) texts her that a “Superman stunt” is going on in the town square.

When Naomi goes over, she sees that it’s more than a stunt, but she soon hears a buzzing in her ears and passes out. As she investigates the stunt for her blog, she gets the help of Lourdes (Camila Moreno), who works in the comic book store and also has a bit of a crush on Naomi. As she and Nathan look at the videos, she sees that Dee (Alexander Wraith), the owner of the tattoo store, is staring right at the actor in the Superman suit. When she goes to the shop and asks him, Dee seems to know the day she was adopted, March 14, and admits to the stunt. But something feels off about it. He also says “You’re asking the wrong questions.”

During a debate on base, Naomi gets dizzy, hears the buzzing and passes out again. When she comes to, she somehow can zoom into a piece of paper that’s across the room, saying there was a “Superman sighting” in the nearby woods. Naomi goes to look into the supposed landing spot and finds a disc with strange writing. But there waiting for her is Zumbado (Cranston Johnson), a slimy used car dealer who tells her cryptic stuff like there aren’t many “people like us.” All the while, it looks like the trees in the woods are coming alive around her, something Zumbado claims is all Naomi’s doing. He also takes the disc.

Trying to get to the bottom of this, Naomi, Annabelle, Nathan, Lourdes, Anthony and her friend Jacob (Aidan Gemme) make a plan to break into his dealership to retrieve the disc. There, she finds a newspaper from the day she was adopted, March 14, 2004, with the headline that there was a UFO sighting in the area. This prompts her to go back to Dee, who spreads some metal wings and tells her the truth.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Naomi, based on the DC character that ultimately became the superhero Powerhouse, has a lot of Smallville in its DNA, especially as it seems like we’re going to be spending a lot of time watching Naomi try to figure out not only her powers, but her origins as well.

Our Take: Ava DuVernay is one of the executive producers of Naomi, and Jill Blankenship is the series’ showrunner. Why do we mention this up front? Because Naomi isn’t the usual Greg Berlanti-produced Arrowverse series, which sometimes tend to blend together due to similar tones and themes. It’s still to be determined that Naomi is part of the Arrowverse, but at least we know that in her world, Superman is real even if no one thinks that he is, and that aliens have been on earth for many years.

Naomi doesn’t hammer its themes about adoption, diversity, and trying to figure out your identity over viewers’ heads, but they are there, just by Naomi’s quest to figure out where she really comes from. But she also loves her parents and has a real life outside of any of this alien superhero stuff. Walfall does a good job of making Naomi that smart, well-liked teenager that we don’t see enough on TV these days. She goes to parties, sure, but her parents also seem to trust her implicitly and she returns that trust, something we don’t see enough on our screens.

This makes for a character that has a support system around her that’s willing to help her figure this whole thing out. In a way, she creates a Buffy-esque Scooby gang, one that will go with her to an abandoned mill or break into a car dealership if she asks them to.

It’s that support system/Scooby gang dynamic which will help viewers who are frustrated that Naomi’s discovery of her origins and powers is going to take place over the course of a season or multiple seasons. The show is less about Naomi as Powerhouse and more about her discovering who she is, which is what invited the comparisons to Smallville. If viewers look at the show from that perspective, and appreciate Walfall’s lead performance, that frustration should dissipate.

Sex and Skin: None.

Parting Shot: Dee, wings extended, asks Naomi, “What is the question?” “The question is… who am I?” a stunned Naomi replies.

Sleeper Star: The stoic performance of Alexander Wraith as Dee should translate well to what it seems his eventual role will be as Naomi’s mentor.

Most Pilot-y Line: Though we liked Naomi’s debate speech on nature vs. nurture, it seemed to be one of the few moments where the show’s themes were not all that subtle.

Our Call: STREAM IT. It does seem like Naomi is going to take its sweet time to explore its main character’s story. And that’s just fine with us, especially if it gives us more time to get to know what seems like an anomaly on TV these days, which is a teenager with her head on straight and a strong desire to find out more about herself.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.

Stream Naomi On CWTV.com