Umbrella Academy Showrunner Talks About Adding Diversity To The Series

For the past few years, Hollywood has finally been making efforts to add more diversity and representation in its films and television series. The Umbrella Academy has been making the same efforts, the series making some alterations to the source material in order to make room for diversity in the series.

Speaking in an interview with Syfy,The Umbrella Academy showrunner Steve Blackman talks about the reason why he had to change certain details of the source material in adapting the Dark Horse comic series for television. Apparently, Blackman didn't want The Umbrella Academy to feature the comic book tropes that plague many other superhero shows like the ones found on Netflix.

"I think if we had done this early on, people would have wanted a page-for-page translation. I think now because there's a plethora of these shows, I got to do a different kind of superhero show," the showrunner told the publication, "There was a lot of pressure on Daredevil to look like Daredevil. For this, I got a lot of leeway from Netflix to do it the way I wanted."

According to Blackman, the book's writer, Gerard Way, loved the alterations made to the show's diversity, saying that the change brought about was "one of the biggest improvements on the source material" – something which the writer wishes he did himself.

While the book features mostly white characters, the adaptation has Allison as a black character played by Emily Raver-Lampman, Ben as an Asian character played by Justice H. Min, and Klaus as a gay character played by Robert Sheehan's Klaus.

What do you think of this added diversity in the series? Feel free to share your thoughts in the comment section below.

The Umbrella Academy season 1 is available for streaming on Netflix.

Read: First Official Trailer For Netflix's Umbrella Academy