Shadowhunters - Seasons 1-2
“Shadowhunters has the only asexual character in all of cable television.”
Title: Shadowhunters: The Mortal Instruments
Episodes Reviewed: Seasons 1-2
Creators: Ed Decter 👨🏼🇺🇸, Todd Slavkin 👨🏼🇺🇸, and Darren Swimmer 👨🏼🇺🇸
Writers: TV scripts by Peter Binswanger 👨🏼🇺🇸 (5 eps), Hollie Overton 👩🏼🇺🇸 (4 eps), Michael Reisz 👨🏼🇺🇸🌈 (4 eps), Y. Shireen Razack 👩🏽🇨🇦🇺🇸 (4 eps), and various (6 ♂ and 4 ♀) based on the novels by Cassandra Clare 👩🏼🇺🇸
Reviewed by Li 👩🏻🇺🇸
Technical: 3.5/5
Shadowhunters is a fan show, through and through. It proudly dons its YA pedigree: Conventionally attractive Twilight-style werewolves and vampires make up its supernatural universe, an arrow-wielding teenager recalls The Hunger Games, and a fast-growing media franchise strives for Harry Potter-levels of ubiquity. For a series that began just over a decade ago, novelist Cassandra Clare has been busy. She has 16 published works, a feature-length film, and a TV series under her belt with at least 9 more books to come.
Clearly, something is resonating with audiences and it resonates in this Freeform show too. It’s not the production values, which look adequate but a touch lo-fi. Nor does the show offer depth or a good sense of pacing. Even the premise of battles between angels and demons lends a palpable sense of déjà vu. Yet human interest will always hook audiences more than craft, and that’s where Clare’s winning formula resides.
Compelling characters with tragic backstories are explored, revisited, and subverted with ongoing development. Relationships build and morph between key players. Against a backdrop of political conflict and brewing war, the landscape is ripe for star-crossed romances and betrayals. Rife with such addictive stories, Shadowhunters quickly becomes an irresistible watch.
Gender: 3.75/5
Does it pass the Bechdel Test? YES, most episodes
Women preside at the heart of Shadowhunters. Novelist Clare brings a female lens to the book series The Mortal Instruments, upon which the show is based, and designates a female lead to tell the story. But beyond that beating core, men occupy the majority of the narrative space. Protagonist Clary Fray (Katherine McNamara) begins her descent into the supernatural through a search and rescue mission of her mother, but upon its conclusion she turns her sights to men—her father as primary antagonist and, from a personal standpoint, the romantic preoccupations with two different men.
Furthermore, Clary’s narrative dominance dissipates as episodes unfold, and the (majority-male) ensemble begins to take over. Among the merry band, Isabelle Lightwood (Emeraude Toubia) enjoys significant screen time, backstory, and plotlines of her own. But she feels fairly stereotypical as the sultry Latina man-eater, clad in plunging necklines and skintight leather as she lures demons to their doom with the crack of a whip.
Beyond Clary and Isabelle, the show gets propelled by male characters like the villain Valentine Morgenstern (Alan Van Sprang), Clary’s love interests Jace Wayland (Dominic Sherwood) and Simon Lewis (Alberto Rosende), Isabelle’s brother Alec Lightwood (Matthew Daddario), and the heads of their respective species, warlock Magnus Bane (Harry Shum Jr.), werewolf Luke Garroway (Isaiah Mustafa), and vampire Raphael Santiago (David Castro). Supporting women do exist, but their stories are tied to the narratives of the aforementioned men.
Relationships between women are underdeveloped, too. While the show starts starts off strong by centering a mother-daughter relationship—and Isabelle also has some beef with her mother, but not in any explored way—that first arc eventually ends and what remains are a handful of shared scenes between Clary and Isabelle. Their friendship is believable, but they remain more focused on male characters than on each other.
Race: 4/5
Shadowhunters boasts characters of color in major roles. Latino, Black, and Asian characters make this New York City-based show fairly accurate to reality. But their roles are largely “colorblind” and lack cultural specificity. It doesn’t help that in the source novels, nearly all characters are white or non-specified, making it trickier for Shadowhunters to infuse meaningful racial and ethnic representation while still adhering to canon. It’s certainly possible, of course, but series creators Ed Decter, Todd Slavkin, and Darren Swimmer—all of whom are white—would have needed to go the extra mile, and they don’t.
Magnus Bane, Alec Lightwood, Jace Wayland, Clary Fray, Simon Lewis, Isabelle Lightwood, and Luke Garroway (left to right)
Of the main ensemble above, white characters Jace and Clary are in the minority. The Lightwoods were cast with mostly Latino actors—a positive change from the books, which describe the Lightwoods as English-Welsh in The Infernal Devices (the prequel to The Mortal Instruments). But the series retains a Eurocentric bias, with Latino characters uniformly light-skinned, including all Lightwoods plus Simon (Rosende, Cuban-Colombian American) and Raphael (Castro, Puerto Rican-Italian American). In addition, the main Latino character, Alec, is played by white actor Daddario who has no Latino or Hispanic heritage.
As for Luke, his role as the sole Black man feels tokenized. He’s tied to the story through relationships with white characters—a romance with Clary’s mother, a father figure to Clary, and a betrayal from Valentine. And while it’s positive to see a brief connection with his sister, the operating word is “brief.” I do enjoy his protective tendencies over Maia Roberts (Alisha Wainwright, who is Jamaican-Haitian American) but their interactions concern werewolf politics with no overt allegories to race.
Despite this surface-level understanding of diversity, Magnus stands out as one of the more refreshing portraits of a man of color. Perhaps this is due to his heritage being explicitly written into the books, where Magnus is half-white and half-Indonesian. Regardless the reason, it’s a joy to watch an Asian American actor play a bisexual warlock partial to nail polish and makeup while still remaining a BAMF. One thought on casting, however; as much as I adore Shum Jr., hiring a Chinese actor for a Southeast Asian role doesn’t come without strings.
As think-pieces on Crazy Rich Asians (2018) have highlighted, in many parts of Asia—such as Singapore, the Philippines, etc.—ethnic Chinese hold most of the economic power. Because of these power dynamics, it doesn’t always feel good to see East Asians playing Southeast Asians. But as long as Southeast Asian actors can still be found in leading roles such as Vincent Rodriguez III on Crazy Ex-Girlfriend or Lana Condor in To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before (2018), or in Canada’s sci-fi show Dark Matter where a Filipino actor plays a Japanese character, then casting Asians across region has yet to fall into problematic territory—on a case by case basis, that is.
LGBTQ: 5/5
Shadowhunters elevates queer characters to major plotlines, the most visible of which is the romance between Magnus and Alec—or, as the show dubs it, “Malec.” Magnus is bisexual and Alec is gay, and they share a healthy relationship that’s intriguingly complicated by the fact that Magnus is immortal and has lived for hundreds of years, while Alec is decidedly mortal. Writers do a fantastic job with Malec, carving out similar amounts of screentime and steaminess as they do for the show’s heterosexual couples.
Furthermore, the writers of Shadowhunters improve upon issues in the source material. As detailed in this comparison by writer Johnathan Galbreath, problematic areas like Alec’s biphobia, or iffy power dynamics between Alec and Magnus, are smoothed over … even to the ire of Clare, in fact. When showrunner Slavkin tweeted that “shows can differ from books,” indicating that Simon’s canonical infidelity would be revised for television, Clare responded with a shady Tweet.
Beyond Malec, Shadowhunters also contains the only asexual character in all of cable television, the vampire Raphael. Raphael says to Isabelle, after she mistakes his feelings for sexual interest, “I’m not like that. I’m just not interested in sex.” Clare has also confirmed Raphael’s asexuality, despite it never being made explicit in the books.
Offscreen, the impact the show has made on the LGBTQ community is palpable. GLAAD campus ambassador alum Aisling McDermott, who identifies as biromantic and asexual, pens an effusive piece called “Why we, the Stans, Love Shadowhunters.” She highlights the intersectionality in having a bisexual Asian character, an asexual Latino, etc. concluding that “the show proves it’s possible to live your life and be more than your labels, and that is why I stan Shadowhunters.”
Mediaversity Grade: B 4.06/5
Not only does Shadowhunters have a sizable queer following, fans of all stripes have banded together to try and resuscitate the show, which was cancelled by ABC after its third season. As a latecomer myself, I’m already a big fan of this delightful guilty pleasure and will be just as disappointed to say goodbye to characters I’ve come to care about over the course of two seasons. In the meantime, I’ll look forward to the third season and its 2-hour finale for closure.
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