Titans is the story of a group that in comics has often been called the "Teen Titans." It began in the 1960s with some of the teen sidekicks to main-character heroes, giving them their own organization and adventures. The team has changed over the years -- the TV show is not the only one to portray all of the team members as actual teenagers, nor to label them simply "Titans" without regard to their age. The show begins with Dick Grayson, better known to many comic fans as Robin, the first sidekick to Batman. Grayson is no longer the Boy Wonder at the side of the Caped Crusader but is instead a police detective in Detroit. He rarely dons his trademark suit and has left Gothan and his former guardian, Batman/Bruce Wayne, because he sees the violent holy war that Batman wages against criminals to be a slippery slope to becoming too much like them.
Robin meets Rachel Roth, a young woman who's got troubles corporeal and otherwise. She seems, when her emotions are strong enough, to have the power to work magic. But a group hunts her with an eye towards ending a threat they say she poses by ending her. Meanwhile, a woman named Kory awakens with few memories but an awful lot of power, and a green-striped tiger proves to be a boy named Gar who can morph into different animals. Over the course of the season the four will come to depend on each other as they learn who Rachel and Kory really are and try to keep Rachel safe. "Kory" is the Tamaran princes Koriand'r, sent to Earth to somehow stop Rachel, aka "Raven," from becoming the doorway into this dimension for her father, the demon Trigon. Along the way they encounter costumed crimefighters Hawk and Dove as well as Donna Troy, the former Wonder Girl, who aid them in their efforts.
The story is part of the problem -- the Trigon-Raven relationship holds no surprises for anyone who's ever followed any version of the Titans in comics or animation. This version of the tale brings nothing new and leaves the season's overall narrative arc with a weak and hollow core. And too much of what we see subscribes to the notion that "darkness" is automatically the path to meaningful, intelligent storytelling. So we have darkness mistaken for depth, but much of the time Titans also mistakes grimness for darkness and brutality for grimness, leaving us three degrees deep into hackery masquerading as narrative. The early fridging of Dick's new partner, Amy Rohrbach, is an example, as is the history of Hank Hall as Hawk. Trigon's illusionary fantasy temptation of Dick that closes out the season is another.
Should showrunners be able to shed their own illusion that they have to try to tell dark stories in order to tell meaningful ones -- or even manage to actually tell a dark story instead of investing in brutality and grimaces -- then Titans might manage to craft a story that builds on these interesting characters and portrayals instead of weighing them down.
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So naturally Netflix canceled it.
The business reasons for doing so seem clear -- Disney now owns the Marvel studios which license the character of Daredevil and they are likely to want to bring their own version of him and his universe into production as soon as their Netflix deal is up, so why waste money building something you're going to lose anyway? And from generalized reports, viewership of nearly all of the Netflix/Marvel shows has declined from their initial outings, which makes continued investment in the properties even less likely.
But there are creative reasons as well. Some of them have plagued the entire partnership project -- seasons that should have been significantly shorter with less sagging in the second half. Or poor narrative decisions, like killing Mahershala Ali's Cottonmouth halfway through the first season of Luke Cage. Or including Iron Fist, a character whose powers derive from ancient mystical arts, in an environment of what are supposed to be "street level" heroes instead of cosmic avengers (or Avengers).
Season three of Daredevil, despite its welcome back-to-basics approach, carries several of these same burdens. It's once again too long. An entire episode apiece is devoted to telling us the backstory of Benjamin Poindexter, the rogue FBI agent who will become the assassin Bullseye and of Karen Page herself. Sure, the former is interestingly done in a semi-surreal minimalist flashback vision -- sort of an Our Town of the damned. And it's about time for the latter, since Page has played major roles in three seasons of Daredevil, and a season of The Punisher and showed up in The Defenders. But Bullseye's past is unnecessary and Page's could be told in about two scenes of conversation and neither requires anything like the screen time they get. Plus, Bullseye's own tale really just serves as a basis for yet another female character introduced solely for the purpose of her murder being used for its impact on a male character -- the tired fridging trope referenced above.
But they bog down the forward progress of the overall story, which is Vincent D'Onofrio's Fisk character manipulating events to get himself freed from prison and have Murdock's Daredevil discredited in the process. Murdock's loss of faith, already weakened by the events of Defenders and the losses it meant for him, produces a ruthless and calculating fighter who is willing to cross almost any line in order to stop Fisk, even if it makes him a criminal himself. Foggy Nelson and Page each try their own routes to get to Fisk and the three learn that they are unable to counter his strategy and ruthlessness on their own. Peter MacRobbie as Fr. Paul Lantom and Joanne Whalley as Sr. Maggie push Murdock to examine whether or not his abandonment of his faith is as big a mistake as his abandonment of his friends.
Season three of Daredevil shows that the creators of the Netflix Marvel shows could learn from their mistakes, as they shed many of the elements which made the show's second season nearly unwatchable all the way through. But it seems they didn't learn enough, or at least way too slowly, so now fans of the great work done by Cox, and co-stars Elden Hensen and Deborah Ann Woll and a strong supporting cast will have to wait and see whether or not these versions of the characters have a future. Unfortunately, tuning in next week won't help us answer that question.
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