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Wonder Man
I watched this over the last couple of days. (8 30-minute episodes on D+.) It's really unusual - not like anything else in Marvel's backlist. Somehow it felt like it belonged to a different era, like the type of superhero show that might've been made in the 70s or 80s. It's a comedy-drama-satire about two out of work actors trying to get a role on the superhero movie Wonder Man, which (in universe) is a remake of a cult hit show from a few decades ago. And that's about 90% of the plot. There is SOME other stuff going on which provides a superhero-related throughline for the movie, namely
But mostly it's just an indie-ish show about being an actor. It's unglamorous, it's full of slow-paced scenes of people doing ordinary things, trying out for parts, dealing with petty professional jealousy and eccentric directors, having long conversations in cars. The staging and lighting and the very ordinary-looking supporting characters are all more art-film than Marvel movie. It's about people who love movies both personally and professionally, and know them inside and out. It's at least partly framed around Midnight Cowboy, at a showing of which the two protagonists meet, and it's also framed around beats from the script for the Wonder Man movie that the two are memorizing and acting out scenes from. At least some of the actors on the show are simply doing cameos as themselves, in the form of people that the protagonists might have plausibly run into in their careers.
I wasn't on board with every creative choice the show made, and in fact I sort of went back and forth between episodes on whether I actually liked it all that much (though I was sold by the end), but it's fascinating and thoughtful and interesting and a bit unpolished-feeling in a way that Marvel productions never feel anymore. In fact, the naturalistic dialogue and slightly clumsy/awkward way the characters relate to each other felt real enough that I would sometimes stumble a bit when it would hit a more typical Marvel beat, as it sometimes does, because it felt a little out of place.
I'm legitimately unsure who the target audience for this show is, and maybe so were Marvel's TPTB. I'm honestly surprised it got made at all.
Of the show's various creative choices, probably the main one where I was like "I see what you're doing here and I support it, but I'm not sure this is actually what I want to be watching at this moment in time" is an entire episode, shot in black and white, about a character we haven't seen before and will never see again. There are a number of reasons why it's in there - it's thematic, it explains why the hero is so deathly afraid of anyone finding out about his powers, and it's also yet another weird/metaphorical/through a glass darkly reflection of the protagonists' relationship - but I am not convinced that it needed to be an entire episode. Or in black and white.
As far as creative choices I was completely on board with, I especially liked that Simon's powers are so thoroughly not the point of the movie that we literally don't find out what they are (or at least what the basic explanation is for their scope) until the final scene of the last episode. There's no origin story; we have no idea why he has them, he just does. There's no big supervillain fight. We finally see him in his full superhero getup on the set of the movie in the final episode. In the very last scene it becomes clear that he's taught himself to use his powers between the last time we saw him using them (at the end of the previous episode) and now, and although we know why, we don't see it - there's no training montage, in fact the role of training montage is actually filled by watching Simon use his acting skills to learn how to impersonate a prison guard.
It's just interesting and it's weird and I really liked what it was doing, mostly. Like I said, it does hit all the standard Marvel beats with the core relationship between the two guys - there's the meet-cute and the odd couple getting to know each other, the bantery bromance, the big betrayal and the redemption/reconciliation. And it was at times during the big beats of this that I was reminded that I was watching a Marvel show and it's going to hit those beats, and as much as I liked those beats, sometimes I wished that it would maybe not hit them quite so hard. (But at the same time, because the rest of the show was so odd, and oddly paced, I genuinely wasn't sure how it was going to end - it really could've pulled a Midnight Cowboy/Butch & Sundance/etc at the end, and it doesn't, but it was plausible that it might, and I really wasn't sure!)
It made me remember how, in the early days of the MCU, it felt like the movies were all doing something different and being something different, and then they just all kinda came to feel like the same thing. This one is doing something different and being something different - in this case: 1970s arthouse film - and even if I wasn't on board with everything, I liked what it was doing and being.
spoilers for things revealed in the first couple of episodes
one of the actors (the protagonist) actually does have superpowers and is hiding it because in the MCU, super-powered individuals have to carry insane amounts of liability insurance to work in Hollywood and no production would hire him; and the other is spying for the government. So obviously both of these things provide the show's main sources of will they? won't they? who'll find out? tension.But mostly it's just an indie-ish show about being an actor. It's unglamorous, it's full of slow-paced scenes of people doing ordinary things, trying out for parts, dealing with petty professional jealousy and eccentric directors, having long conversations in cars. The staging and lighting and the very ordinary-looking supporting characters are all more art-film than Marvel movie. It's about people who love movies both personally and professionally, and know them inside and out. It's at least partly framed around Midnight Cowboy, at a showing of which the two protagonists meet, and it's also framed around beats from the script for the Wonder Man movie that the two are memorizing and acting out scenes from. At least some of the actors on the show are simply doing cameos as themselves, in the form of people that the protagonists might have plausibly run into in their careers.
I wasn't on board with every creative choice the show made, and in fact I sort of went back and forth between episodes on whether I actually liked it all that much (though I was sold by the end), but it's fascinating and thoughtful and interesting and a bit unpolished-feeling in a way that Marvel productions never feel anymore. In fact, the naturalistic dialogue and slightly clumsy/awkward way the characters relate to each other felt real enough that I would sometimes stumble a bit when it would hit a more typical Marvel beat, as it sometimes does, because it felt a little out of place.
I'm legitimately unsure who the target audience for this show is, and maybe so were Marvel's TPTB. I'm honestly surprised it got made at all.
Of the show's various creative choices, probably the main one where I was like "I see what you're doing here and I support it, but I'm not sure this is actually what I want to be watching at this moment in time" is an entire episode, shot in black and white, about a character we haven't seen before and will never see again. There are a number of reasons why it's in there - it's thematic, it explains why the hero is so deathly afraid of anyone finding out about his powers, and it's also yet another weird/metaphorical/through a glass darkly reflection of the protagonists' relationship - but I am not convinced that it needed to be an entire episode. Or in black and white.
As far as creative choices I was completely on board with, I especially liked that Simon's powers are so thoroughly not the point of the movie that we literally don't find out what they are (or at least what the basic explanation is for their scope) until the final scene of the last episode. There's no origin story; we have no idea why he has them, he just does. There's no big supervillain fight. We finally see him in his full superhero getup on the set of the movie in the final episode. In the very last scene it becomes clear that he's taught himself to use his powers between the last time we saw him using them (at the end of the previous episode) and now, and although we know why, we don't see it - there's no training montage, in fact the role of training montage is actually filled by watching Simon use his acting skills to learn how to impersonate a prison guard.
It's just interesting and it's weird and I really liked what it was doing, mostly. Like I said, it does hit all the standard Marvel beats with the core relationship between the two guys - there's the meet-cute and the odd couple getting to know each other, the bantery bromance, the big betrayal and the redemption/reconciliation. And it was at times during the big beats of this that I was reminded that I was watching a Marvel show and it's going to hit those beats, and as much as I liked those beats, sometimes I wished that it would maybe not hit them quite so hard. (But at the same time, because the rest of the show was so odd, and oddly paced, I genuinely wasn't sure how it was going to end - it really could've pulled a Midnight Cowboy/Butch & Sundance/etc at the end, and it doesn't, but it was plausible that it might, and I really wasn't sure!)
It made me remember how, in the early days of the MCU, it felt like the movies were all doing something different and being something different, and then they just all kinda came to feel like the same thing. This one is doing something different and being something different - in this case: 1970s arthouse film - and even if I wasn't on board with everything, I liked what it was doing and being.
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I had heard nothing about this show and it sounds, in the positive sense, completely whacked.
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Thank you! Processing visual media is still very much not something my brain is doing well with, but I will put it on the list!
If nothing else, it's probably the most creatively interesting thing that the Marvel TV/movie division has done in a decade and possibly ever.
I am glad it dropped in from the parallel dimension where the MCU did not all become extruded superhero product.
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I am glad it dropped in from the parallel dimension where the MCU did not all become extruded superhero product.
It really does feel like that!
It's also interesting because one thing I'd been thinking about in the last few weeks was a general craving for TV shows that are about something. This was on my mind because two of the last things I'd watched had been Babylon 5 and MASH, which very much were about something. And I was thinking about the lack of that in most shows both recent and not. And then this show falls into my lap and it, too, is About Things. I mean, figuring out what it's about is a bit difficult because it is indeed completely whacked (positive), but one of the things it's definitely about is public appearances and the way this interacts with private personas. I was trying for a good half of the show to figure out why its main real-world movie metaphor was Midnight Cowboy because it could have done basically any number of buddy movies that are Not That, but I actually do think that's why, and why they chose that movie to intersect with a fictional superhero movie.
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