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The Gifted Season 1: What Happened To The X-Men?

The Gifted premieres on Monday, and it looks like it's going to be a very different X-Men show than anything we've seen so far. The movies have been all big adventures while the fate of either the human race or mutants on the line. Legion is an entirely different animal, and we don't even know what time period it takes place in or what's real. The Gifted showrunner Matt Nix recently sat down down with CBR and expanded a bit about what we know about this universe:

"The X-Men are gone. The Brotherhood is gone. Most of the powerful classic mutants are not around. People don't know where they've gone. They are shrouded in mystery. It comes out gradually over the course of the series that there's been a cataclysmic event, a bit of a 9/11 event, that caused enormous social upheaval and a lot of hatred towards mutants. It's somehow related to the disappearance of the X-Men and the Brotherhood."

While this is a different angle to the X-Men universe, all of the themes are ones that series has been exploring since its inception:

"They are working to deal with the results on this society-wide crackdown on mutants. They are trying to get mutants in trouble to safety. It's not illegal to be a mutant, but it's functionally illegal to use your powers in a public place in any way that could conceivably endanger anyone. So, The Gifted is another way into those classic questions of the X-Men. This group is asking itself a lot of the same questions that have been asked in the comics and the movies, but they are asking them from a unique perspective. They don't have a mansion. They don't have a jet. They are living in a ruined bank that is falling down and rests on the outskirts of Atlanta. They don't have anything, including money. They are struggling to buy food. It's a very different take on the comics, but they ask some of the same questions. Some people want to fight. Some people want to find a way to co-exist."

The family we'll be following are the Struckers, who get a very harsh lesson about the life of privilege they've been living when the kids manifest powers.

"The other side of it is the Strucker family coming into this," Nix explained, "having lived on the human side of the equation and enjoyed the rights and privileges that humans have in this society and mutants don't, really, and not realizing that was the case. They were blind to their own privileges and now they find themselves on the other side of this equation. They are waking to the reality of the world that they live in. Reed Strucker, who was prosecuting mutants, had felt like he was a human person just enforcing the law. He didn't hate anybody, but now finds he was part of a system that was really hurting people."

The Gifted premieres Monday, October 2nd at 9 p.m. ET/8 p.m. C on Fox.

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