Baskets and Legion ended their runs this month and while the above posters make the shows look completely different, they actually have a lot in common.
Both are about men who are lost, a childhood irreparably damaged followed by adulthood fr
Baskets
That said, Baskets takes place in Bakersfield. California which offers its own levels of wild characters.
Through four seasons, Chip Baskets struggles for success. He fails out of a prestigious French clown school and his marriage disintegrates too. Clowning is his life’s passion and that profession is hard to get respect in even the best of circumstances. Being a starving artist is rough and when everyone thinks you’re a joke, having a healthy amount of self-esteem is even harder. Plus his love life is a failure too, so Chip has to crash back at home where his mother does her best to keep him going. In a constant battle with his twin brother Dale, Chip is always fighting for air. While Dale has seemingly done better at life that Chip, he has his own mountain of problems to overcome.
Always in the backseat of the decision making, season 3 saw Chip get real responsibility as the CEO of The Baskets Family Circus. He’s able to dabble in clowning as well as run the show. For a guy that’s struggled to grow up, it’s the most responsibility and control he’s ever had. He jumps at the chance to be seen as an adult to everyone around him. Season 4 sees that opportunity get difficult and he seeks council elsewhere with a life coach he finds (hijacks) from his friend from Martha.
All in all, Chip just wants to be independent. The ability to control his own life can come from that and he desperately wants it. So this guy who lost his father at a young age, always in the shadow of his mother and brothers, keeps fighting for it. For years he’s kicked as hard as he can to keep his head above water and in this last season, it all comes to a head. When he tries to save the rodeo and his mother takes control away from him, he breaks. It’s a testament to who he is that the people around him come to save him, they don’t let him drift away. There’s no clean ending to Baskets but we do get to see that Chip gets back up and continues to get his own pride, independence, and chance to be happy.
In Legion David also struggles for identity. His father abandons him as an infant, his mother dies when he’s very young and his sister does her best to raise him. Soon he’s diagnosed as a schizophrenic and institutionalized. He’s told that he’s crazy–that the things he’s seeing and the fantastic things he can do aren’t real–turns out that he’s anything but. As David discovers, he was inhabited by a powerful evil force when he was an infant and he’s a mutant himself. The son of Charles Xavier, one of the most powerful mutants, David has unfathomable powers.
Like Chip Baskets, David was drawn a bad hand from the start and his life is a struggle because of it. Resentful of his father abandoning him–left to deal with these terrifying powers and a legit monster inside of him on his own–for a long time David doesn’t know which way is up. He ends up killing a lot of people and harming the ones who at one point fought at his side.
The comic book origins of Legion offered the writers a lot of outside the box storytelling possibilities. This show frequently goes off into the deep end to show if it’s concepts and ideas. The production is unbelievable with it’s editing, set design, direction, and cinematography. There’s no other show on now that looks or tries to do the stuff that Legion does. The budget keeps the action scenes from being huge, but what they do is really effective (something The Walking Dead needs to learn from). It can get confusing to watch, there’s a lot of heady concepts being thrown around in untraditional ways (looking at you season 2). Now that the series is complete, I think being able to watch it all without having to wait will be a big help in understanding the story.
David’s story is one of redemption. He has terrible visions from a powerful being that makes him dangerous to others. He desperately wants to fix what’s wrong with him and on that journey, he finds out a lot of painful things about his past (things that he had no control over). His father let all this happen to him and his family and that makes the anger in him grow even more. Once excised of the demon, it doesn’t change his mentality. He starts a cult where he brainwashes everyone into loving him and it does nothing to help him. It’s all phony and he knows it. By using his powers to try and fix things, it’s made him just as dangerous as before, but now he can aim his powers where he wants them. A threat to mankind, his old friends come after him to shut him down. When all his plans to make his life better fail, David becomes obsessed with changing the past.
And that’s where David’s redemption comes in. In this last season, he finds Switch, a mutant with time travel powers. The end becomes a race between life, death, and morality.
Both of these shows are about a broken person and their relationships. They take very different paths in exploring their concepts but they both do extraordinary things with their character studies.