14 best superhero TV shows of 2021

Loki

On paper, Loki was the most eagerly-anticipated of Disney Plus’ Marvel Cinematic Universe TV shows and for good reason. Tom Hiddleston’s titular Trickster was undoubtedly among the MCU films’ most popular characters and he achieved that status by playing a supporting role in every single one of his appearances, so the prospect of him leading his own superhero adventure, let alone a six part series, was very exciting indeed.

The third of the MCU shows this year, it followed the Avengers: Endgame version of the character after he disappeared into the timeline with the Tesseract. But this God of Mischief had learned very few of the redemptive lessons that his big screen counterpart did, so a large portion of Loki‘s first episode was about having him learn those lessons in a short space of time. While it could have done with a little more of that, just because Hiddleston is so great at it, the show must go on.

And on it went, with a compelling mystery about an allusive time variant causing mischief around the timeline (and, no, we’re not talking about Loki himself) and killing off the members of the Time Variance Authority that tried to put it right.

Loki‘s strength lay in the grandeur of that mystery and the ensemble cast trusted with solving it. While the show did occasionally feel like its attempts to outsmart itself impacted the pacing, its star-studded cast of the likes of Hiddleston, Owen Wilson, Sophia Di Martino and Gugu Mbatha-Raw made even time standing still an unforgettable adventure.