“Black Lightning,” airing Tuesdays, is the reluctant comeback story of a hero grappling with heroism’s limits. In the first two episodes, “Black Lightning” is suffused with the ideas of Black Lives Matter, though it comes at them from an angle. But the context of “Black Lightning” is everything. Here, the image — a powerful black man quelling his emotion and struggling to present as calm, smaller, nonthreatening — has the strength of parable. The One Hundred’s members are thinly sketched, and they make paltry competition for an armored superguy who shoots lightning from his fingertips.

Source: New York Times January 15, 2018 15:00 UTC