Fox and Marvel are releasing a new television series. The Gifted takes place in the X-Men Universe and revolves around a family on the run from the government. X-Men is a comic book property that began in the early sixties and was created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. The X-Men is an allegorical story about mutants and their struggles with not only humans but with people just like them. The leader of the X-Men, Charles Xavier, is a professor and runs a school for ‘gifted youngsters’.

The X-Men franchise hit skyrocket popularity with its animated series in the nineties. The series brought the pages of the comics to life and with the even bigger success of the series, a live-action film was greenlit. Premiering in 2000 X-Men was the first live-action comic book adaptation that was taken seriously. Long before the Marvel Cinematic Universe and DC Extended Universe, there was the X-Men franchise raking in the cash.

Now, 20th Century Fox and Marvel are heading back to the small screen, only not animated this time. In 2016, FX (a component of 20th Century Fox) premiered Legion a series based on the son of Charles Xavier entitled after his code name. The success led to Fox is premiering its second television series surrounding mutants, The Gifted. 

The series takes place in the future where the X-Men are “gone”. The Strucker family is soon on the run from the government when parents, Reed and Kate, find out their children contain the X-Gene. The gene that mutates your cells and grants you special abilities, the mutant gene. Along the way, many different well known X-Men characters from the pages and the screen are introduced. Polaris, the daughter of Magneto (the Malcolm X to Prof. Xavier’s MLK) who contains electromagnetic manipulation and flight. Blink, whose previous appearance was in the 2014 film Days of Future Past, who can manifest teleportation portals. Some new mutants were made just for the series including, Eclipse, a mutant with the ability to manipulate solar power.

The mutants join the Struckers on the run while fighting off new sentinel robots.

The series is getting rave reviews from critics and hopefully, fans will embrace the old with the new and watch The Gifted.