Max’s Harley Quinn still warms the heart and grates the nerves

Unless you’ve already embraced the manic charms of Harley Quinn, getting on the wavelength of its latest season takes some doing. The DC Universe as it exists in this Max series, now in its fifth season (a feat the live-action Superman & Lois couldn’t replicate), is home almost exclusively to the miserable, frantic, depraved, pathetic, but otherwise upbeat and well-meaning pajamas-in-public super-folks who openly wallow in their personal messes. If nothing else, this DCU has big-time hangover brunch energy: It’s messy, hungry for attention, and very, very loud.  

This season’s big bad, the cosmic perfectionist Brainiac (Stephen Fry), has a more succinct description: “This is the most unadvanced civilization I have ever encountered!” He’s correct, of course, but as it happens, the capricious Harley Quinn (Kaley Cuoco) turns out to be a suitable foil for Superman’s nemesis, depicted here as a prickly hobbyist who collects shrunken cities in neat, vacuum-sealed bottles and has set his sights on Harley’s new home: Metropolis. This unexpected conflict between disparate DC characters (more exciting in theory than in practice) raises the question: Where is Superman? Also, how did Harley end up on Jimmy Olsen’s turf? We’re getting ahead of ourselves. 

Season five of Harley Quinn is a curiously neat jumping-on point for the adults-only animated series that conforms its surroundings—perhaps serendipitously, perhaps deliberately—to align with the looming opening salvo from James Gunn and Peter Safran’s quickly growing DC Studios. There is an in-story reason for Harley’s big move with Poison Ivy (Lake Bell)—in truth, a hop across the bay from Gotham City, which clashes with Superman’s hometown in one of the season’s better visual jokes—and it’s as simple (or flimsy) as you might expect: Harlivy is in a rut, and the pair need a change of scenery. One wonders what rent is like in Metropolis, but this terrible twosome need not worry about that, as Bruce Wayne (Diedrich Bader), fresh from his prison stay last season, is footing the bill.

Previous seasons kept Harley’s criminal impulses in flux as her ever-changing relationship with Ivy grew from a bad-girl team-up to their present status as romantic homebodies. Harley has long since moved on from the Joker (Alan Tudyk), and so has Harley Quinn. (In fact, when the Joker does appear this season, the two hardly exchange a word.) This bolt away from the character’s doormat days has led to humdrum domesticity, a purposely conventional tempo that Harley Quinn maintains this season, possibly to avoid irking those who jealously protect the Harlivy ship. (“I mean, can you imagine the meltdown on the internet if we [broke up]?” Ivy asks at one point.) So, in place of mayhem (at first, anyway), Harley lives that nesting life, gorging on Thai food and nuzzling with her special lady in front of the TV. Their move to Metropolis is meant to give them (and their sex life) a much-needed kick in the booty shorts, not to disrupt what has become a nice—if dull—relationship. 

For a time, Metropolis is the shot in the arm that both Harley Quinn and its crime-adjacent couple need. Its lively premiere episode, “The Big Apricot,” plays with Gotham’s current untenable state in a way that, for a fleeting moment, feels like Fritz The Cat on a Four Loko bender: The streets are plagued by muggings and explosions, a kid skips rocks in a puddle of toxic sludge, and giant rats scale the city’s crumbling buildings, all presented as business as usual. By contrast, Metropolis, with its beaming skyline gilded by sunshine and the Daily Planet globe, is a utopia. Yet this optimistic visual shift doesn’t challenge the show’s mordant sense of humor in the slightest, as Metropolitans are just as skeevy, libidinous, and belligerent as their Gotham counterparts. Naturally, their new residents fit in just fine. New digs, same Harley.

The series quickly notes that this urban paradise isn’t thanks to the presence of Superman (James Wolk)—a sad-sack who Harley convinces to fly off-planet for some “me time” (lest his powers render the season-long Brainiac issue moot)—but the bold initiatives brought forth by Lena Luthor (Aisha Tyler), sister of Lex (Wendell Pierce, filling in for Giancarlo Esposito). It feels like Lena is here to muck up Harley and Ivy’s home life, and in a strangely unmessy sort of way, she does: Early on, she offers Ivy a job greenifying Metropolis’s sleek, sterile skyline, which leaves Harley at home taking care of King Shark’s (Ron Funches) chompy offspring, though any disharmony that results from Lena’s meddling is nipped in the bud with a pep talk and a smooch. Lena eventually creates fissures in Harley’s life, but none that can be discussed in this review.

Other potential spoilers arrive in the form of Jason Woodrue (John Slattery), Ivy’s former professor and lover, and Red X, who crashes a murder mystery dinner at the Wayne Penthouse with a real hate-on for Harley. These developments come and go as Brainiac obligingly waits in outer orbit for his turn to have some fun, yet the passion between the core duo remains stronger than ever. 

That leaves us with the series’ frothy energy. Harley Quinn operates in a perpetual cycle of crazed behavior, sex-positive yuks, and brief bursts of ultraviolence, pivoting from one to the other on a dime. When the Brainiac origin episode rolls around, it feels like a reprieve from the series’ unblinking raunchiness and ceaseless shouting (why does everyone scream their lines?), though—surprise, surprise—even extraterrestrials require sexual satiation. Still, there are effective beats that poke through the noise: Ivy is reunited with Frank (JB Smoove), the agreeably pervy Audrey II-looking plant to whom Ivy is fiercely protective, and there’s a story beat deeper into the season that features a cry for help across the stars that’s as impactful as anything you’ll see in a DC product. 

Predictably, the Harley Quinn ensemble also ends up in Metropolis for appropriately silly reasons. Bane (James Adomian) ingratiates himself into the city’s upper crust, while Clayface (Tudyk) takes the city’s theater scene by storm with a one-man show based on Pearl Harbor. The latter serves as a B-plot that stretches throughout the season (it involves the abduction of Daily Planet editor Perry White), and though it’s occasionally amusing, it doesn’t amount to much more than drawing attention to how Harley Quinn suddenly feels like a show in stasis, unwilling to change the status quo even when all-new backdrops have been painted for it. It’s a level of caution that contradicts this season’s mantra: “The mess is the point.” Messes are rewarding to sort through. But this one politely tidies up once it’s over and leaves nothing behind.   

Harley Quinn season five premieres January 16 on Max