Series / Stan Lee's Lucky Man

Stan Lee's Lucky Man is a 2016 British superhero/supernatural police procedural created by Stan Lee & Neil Biswas. It airs on Sky1 in the United Kingdom, produced by Carnival Films and is scheduled to air for 10 episodes with the first episode airing on January 22, 2016. The show stars James Nesbitt, Eva Best, Sienna Guillory and Amara Karan.

Taking place in the Greater London area, Metropolitan Police Service officer Detective Inspector Harry Clayton comes across a woman named Eve, who gives him a Tang Dynasty bronze bracelet after a one night stand. While DI Clayton gets to investigating the murder of Triad boss Freddie Lau, he gets luck and more headway than the other CLP officers thanks to the bracelet's powers to grant him luck in finding significant clues to the case. He's later warned by Eve that while he gets good luck, others will have some misfortune happen to them as a means of balancing the yin and yang.

Due to the good reception, the show has aired three seasons.

The show provides examples of the following tropes:

• All Myths Are True: According to research done, the bracelet was used by the former Empress of the Tang Dynasty to gain influence over the Emperor. Many people began to fear her because of her influence and thus, made arrangements to have her killed.
• Age-Gap Romance: James Nesbitt was 51 when the show started, with Harry presumably being the same age, while Eve was established to either be 33 or 34 years old in the Series 1 final, meaning there's an age gap of roughly 18 years between the characters. Despite this, the first episode has Eve seducing Harry and sleeping with him in order to place the bracelet on him. It's also implied that Isabella is roughly the same age as Eve, if a few years older, which means there is a similar age gap between herself and Harry.
• Arc Words: "Sooner or later your/Harry's luck is gonna run out".
• Badass Longcoat: After faking his death and leaving the morgue, Blake wears a longcoat for the rest of the series.
• Big Bad:
  • Golding for season 1
  • Isabella for season 2
  • Blake for season 3
• Big Brother Instinct: Harry lost a brother as a child and is now very protective over Rich, despite some distance in their relationship. Deconstructed since Harry's enemies are quick to realise that this is his biggest weakness and the easiest way to hurt him.
• Bittersweet Ending: With the show not being renewed for a fourth series, this is how the show ends. Winter, Suri and so many others have died over the course of the show and Harry is forced to fake his death to avoid prison and live some sort of normal life. He's also unable to repair his relationship with Anna, who is seemingly someone else, while his friendship with Eve is seemingly destroyed forever. However, Harry reunites with Daisy to live some sort of normal life now that he doesn't have the bracelet, Orwell is promoted to DSI, Eve goes into hiding and is now pregnant with Blake's child but seems hopeful now that she's also free from the bracelets, and Rich decides to join the police. Meanwhile the bracelets are now returned to the Torches and kept secure, meaning that nobody else can abuse them.
• Blue Is Heroic: Harry's jacket and trousers are usually a dark shade of blue.
• Britain Is Only London: Justified. The show entirely takes place in London.
  • Doubling for London: Averted entirely for the show's setting.
• Broken Pedestal: Harry becomes one to Suri over the coarse of series 1. Becomes the Rebuilt Pedestal in series 2 only for him to back to being broken in the third series.
• The Bus Came Back: After being absent after Series 2, Kalim returns in Series 3.
• Call-Back: Early on, Harry and his brother try to remove the bracelet using a power saw. The saw breaks and chunks of it almost kill the brother's assistant. In a later episode, some bad guys try to cut the bracelet off using a power saw and Harry does not fight them because he knows that the exact same thing will happen.
• Can't Kill You, Still Need You: The main reason Eve is still alive.
• Cassandra Truth: In Series 2, Harry does try to tell Anna the truth about the bracelet and that he literally can't remove it. However she simply believes his addiction has made him delusional. Isabella eventually proves to her that the bracelets are real.
• Casual High Drop: Harry is trying to escape from the bad guys but to do so he must jump off a roof of a building. The jump is guaranteed to break some bones unless you are very lucky and land just right. Fortunately for Harry, he has an ancient bracelet that makes its wearer extremely lucky. He lands on the ground with no injuries.
  • Later, in Series 3, Harry leaps off a tall building to keep Blake from shooting him. Harry walks away the next morning, only saying that he's "tired", and has a few cuts. He's not wearing the bracelet when this occurs.
• Clingy MacGuffin: The bracelet can't be removed until the wearer dies.
• Cowboy Cop: Harry is this, which is why Alistair Winter and Steve Orwell hate him. However unlike most examples of this trope, he has a pretty strict Thou Shalt Not Kill rule and is pretty insistent on only bending the rules instead of outright breaking them, as well as not wanting Suri to end up like him.
• Creator Cameo: Stan Lee is seen briefly in the pilot episode signing autographs at a comic book store.
  • He also shows up in "Trojan Horse", thinking that Harry's going to kill himself by jumping on the Tube's rails.
  • In "Facing Your Demons", he shows up as a bar visitor in Central when he says to Harry "For the record, I liked it."
• Cure Your Gays: Deconstructed in "Playing with Fire" when the killer turns to be a man who after realizing he's still gay kills the man who "cured" him, then his wife, and was caught trying to kill the priest who started it all so it could never happen to anybody ever again.
• Dark and Troubled Past: When he was six years old, Harry was in a car accident with his mother and twin brother Frank. While Harry was unable to undo his seatbelt and get out of the car, being told by his mother to get as far as he could from the car which was now on fire, his mother and brother were both killed when the car exploded. It also turns out that while working with Winters, Harry's Cowboy Cop antics resulted in people being killed by a criminal.
• Disney Death: Harry is seemingly electrocuted near the end of season two but is back by the next episode.
  • In the third season, Harry leaps off a building to escape Blake. He is seemingly killed in the fall, but stands up the next morning and is only tired. He isn't wearing the bracelet.
• Distressed Dude: Rich role is basically this, often being kidnapped and placed in danger by the Big Bad.
• Driven to Suicide: Since the bracelet can only be removed by the owner's death, this is the fate of most previous owners.
• Dropped a Bridge on Him: Justified; abusing the bracelet will often lead to the abrupt death of someone around you.
• Foil: Orwell and Winters are two antagonistic officer who hate Harry and believe him to be corrupt. However Series 1 shows that despite sharing the goal of "exposing" Harry, Winters is actually far more moral, willing to listen to Harry on certain issues and capable of recognising that there is in fact some sort of conspiracy. He even clarifies to Suri that despite his past with Harry, it hasn't affected how he's conducted his investigation. Orwell however is willing to cross any lines to arrest Harry and in fact hides evidence that would reveal Rich to be innocent and suggest that Harry was innocent of a crime, ironically becoming the sort of man he believes Harry to be.
• Frame-Up: In the 3rd season, one of the plot points is that Harry's being accused of murdering Isabella during the confrontation at Metropolitan Police Service HQ as The Scapegoat.
• The Gambling Addict: Harry has a serious gambling problem. It destroyed his marriage and he owes Freddie Lau. Once he gets the bracelet, he stops gambling because it's not really gambling if you always win.
• Good Luck Charm: The bracelet DI Clayton acquired. However, Eve warns him bad luck will happen to others every time he gets good luck.
  • In Series 3, Daisy gives her father Harry a braided wrist bracelet for luck after he loses the good-luck bracelet.
• Grand Finale: With Series 3 turning out to be the last series, the final episode becomes this where Harry must stop the Big Bad from blowing up London without the help of his magic bracelet.
• Hidden Depths: Despite his tough guy exterior, Orwell surprises Suri by being pretty knowledgeable about obscure forms of art. Subverted and parodied in Series 3, where at appears that he knows Chinese only for it to be revealed that he had simply practiced how to introduce himself and has a book to try and understand the language.
• Hypocritical Humor: "You'd be a smartarse if you were smart."
• I Cannot Self-Terminate: Isabella's bracelet causes all her suicide attempts to fail.
• Imperial Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy: Anyone trying to shoot at Harry becomes an honorary member for the duration. However, it is implied that a highly trained sniper could kill Harry on the third shot because even the bracelet has limits.
• Killed Off for Real:
  • In Series 2, Winter is killed by Isabella once he figured out that she had something to Harry's accident.
  • Series 3 has Suri and Elsa Gray be killed because of Blake and Eve.
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall: After being told about the bracelet, Daisy talks to Rich about how all superheroes have someone who can help them, like Batman who has Alfred and Spider-Man who has Aunt May. She suggests that since Rich knows a lot about old things and she knows a lot about weird things, they should be these things for Harry. Rich, who has used his knowledge to help Harry already, acknowledges that this is probably true.
• Locked Out of the Loop: For most of the series, Harry keeps pretty much everyone in the dark about his bracelet, which makes sense since it's hard to believe. In Series 2 he tries to tell Anna, though she doesn't believe him, and Daisy learns and accepts the truth. This trope however is fully deconstructed in regards to his relationship with Suri, since his secrecy about what is happening contributes to him becoming a Broken Pedestal and Suri being unable to to trust him when he's the victim of a Frame-Up.
• Make Way for the New Villains: At the start of season two Isabella helps Harry and Eve take down Golding.
• Minor Crime Reveals Major Plot: The murder of Freddie Lau has DI Clayton investigate the case with DS Chohan. However, Harry realizes that parts of the case were tied to the power of the bronze bracelet and to those who wore it before.
• Money to Burn: Harry burns all of his casino winnings in order to neutralize any backlash that might happen due to his lucky streak. The next time he wins a lot of money at poker, he leaves the money on the table and tells the other players to burn it.
• I Never Said It Was Poison: Episode 5 of season 1; A suspect supposedly had no idea who Liliane Lau is, even though Clayton never said her last name aloud.
• Nudity Tropes: When Blake fakes his death and leaves the morgue, there's an extended shot of Rupert Penry-Jones' bum as he walks out.
• Police Are Useless:
  • Played with a bit. The MPS is on top of the case, starting with the murder of Lau. But with the help of Clayton's bracelet, he's able to get a major headstart on the murder case and the others that soon follow. While the others are stumped, his luck leads him straight to major clues.
  • Averted at the end of the first season. Once the other cops realize that Harry was right, they quickly follow the evidence and track down the bad guys as fast as Harry.
  • Played in the third season where the MPS and the Hong Kong Police Force hunt Harry down because he murdered Isabella when a shot of it was seen in surveillance footage, which was obviously forged.
• Power at a Price: The bracelet basically gives the wearer good luck by "taking" the luck from others, with the result that every time Harry does something really unlikely something bad is likely to happen to at least one of his friends or family.
• Practically Different Generations: Much like their actors, Rich seems to at least be 20 years younger than Harry.
• Red and Black and Evil All Over: Isabella's outfit is a red Badass Longcoat and trousers with a black shirt during her final confrontation with Harry in Series 2, who as always is a case of Blue Is Heroic.
• Shadow Archetype: Harry eventually realises that Isabella is him after 10 years with the bracelet and having nobody to care about, being reduced to a thrill seeking killer with almost no morals.
• Shout-Out: In one episode, Rich is watching John Wick.
• Superhero: Of the Not Wearing Tights variety, as while more of a supernatural mystery show the series has some superhero influences. The intro even has comic panels, while in Series 2 Daisy does compare Henry to a superhero when she learns about the bracelet.
• Surprisingly Realistic Outcome: In Series 1, Orwell is willing to bend the rules to try and find evidence that Harry is corrupt, and even tried to hide evidence that would have freed Rich from prison. As a result, he's demoted to Detective Constable in Series 2 after an Internal Affairs investigation.
• Thou Shalt Not Kill: As much as a Cowboy Cop Harry can be he refuses to commit the worst crime of all. His attempt to actually kill Blake causes him to lose all of sense of self worth and belief in himself.
• Title Drop: In the last episode, different people start calling Harry "Lucky Man".
• Took a Level in Jerkass: Suri becomes this in Series 3, with Harry constantly keeping her Locked Out of the Loop and his Frame-Up resulting in a complete Broken Pedestal where she finds it difficult to trust Harry and tries to arrest him. Even after realising the truth, she still has moments of distrusting him and trying to do things her way, despite Harry's attempts to explain things.
• Took a Level in Kindness: Winter is this in Series 2, with his relationship with Harry being more friendly as he no longer suspects him of being corrupt and feels guilty for sending him to prison where he was almost killed. Orwell, while at first still relatively antagonistic to Harry, also becomes a nicer character and admits he made mistakes. He ironically becomes Harry's biggest supporter during Harry's Frame-Up and his last true ally after all his other friends die or betray him.
• War for Fun and Profit: Vincent Lermentov made his fortune by buying large quantities of gold right before a major war or disaster caused the price of gold to rise. It is unclear if the bracelet caused these calamities so Lermentov could profit from them or if it simply predicted these events and caused him to buy the gold beforehand.
• Wham Episode:
  • "Facing Your Demons": Blake successfully frames Harry for killing Isabela.
  • "Run Rabbit Run": Blake uses the cover of a MI-6 agent to prove his frameup of Harry is legit.
  • "The Art of War": Eve takes out Suri in public.
• What the Hell, Hero?: Blake corrupting the bracelet comes back to bite him when Eve later puts it on him, cancelling out the good-luck bracelet he is wearing on his other wrist.
• Winds of Destiny, Change!: This is the power of the bracelet, granting the wearer good luck at the cost of bad luck occurring to those they care about. From how it's portrayed, it generally requires the wearer to consciously wanting something to occur that would benefit them for anything too complicated, though there seems to be an element of Harry's subconscious leading to a certain amount of minor good luck. Julian claims that the bracelet, in an effort to better protect him, the bracelet influences his decisions to prevent him from making any decisions that would bring him bad luck and lead to his death.
• You Are Better Than You Think You Are: In the finale episode, Harry now hates himself for breaking his Thou Shalt Not Kill (even if he didn't succeed) and blames himself for all the death caused since he got the bracelet. Daisy however reassures him that he's a superhero and gives him a new bracelet after he loses his magic one to try and restore his confidence.