Wonder Man follows aspiring Hollywood actor Simon Williams as he struggles to launch his career. After a chance encounter with veteran actor Trevor Slattery, he discovers that a legendary director is remaking the in-universe superhero film Wonder Man.

Wonder Man Review (season 1)

Echo, Ironheart, She-Hulk: Marvel doesn’t exactly have the best track record when it comes to… anything it’s produced for the better part of a decade. When it announced yet another series based on one of its legacy heroes, few celebrated. Still, if Marvel was going to gamble again, choosing Wonder Man—a character with little cultural footprint and even less to lose—was arguably the smartest place to experiment.

Did the gamble pay off? No. Is Wonder Man the same unmitigated disaster as the rest of the refuse Disney and Marvel have been churning out for years? Also no. Unlike those regrettable entries into the MCU, this show has a handful of good moments, stars two strong leading performers, and ends with a modicum of potential leading into the second season.

Ben Kingsley, who reprises his role as Trevor Slattery (The Mandarin in Iron Man 3), phones in a performance that far exceeds that of most other actors who give it their all, managing to raise the middling material to just north of middling. That may not sound like much of an achievement, but believe me, it is.

While Slattery is an oddball eccentric with just enough dimension to give Kingsley something to elevate, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, who plays Simon (aka Wonder Man), does what he can with a flat and charismaless character whose personal growth is as shallow as the talent pool in the Star Trek: Starfleet Academy writers’ room. Simon wants to be an actor, but he’s so enamored with the art and so incredibly talented that he overanalyzes the most mundane of details, bringing even the simplest scene to a halt.

Anchored by the show’s unwillingness to progress throughout the season and a pencil-sketched character with poor interpersonal skills, Yahya’s hero never gets off the ground. What must Simon do to overcome this career-killing personality flaw? Believe in himself. Not exactly the kind of complexity most actors dream of sinking their teeth into.

Wonder Man pays lip service to the tried-and-true playbook: a struggling loner with a dark secret who befriends a quirky yet lovable oddball who teaches him the meaning of friendship, etc. However, it spends the bulk of its roughly four hours returning to the pulpit to preach of the miracle that is cinema rather than furthering the plot in any meaningful way, hoping that Kingsley’s comedic chops will glaze what becomes a very stale donut by the eighth episode.

What emerges is a repetitive show with a conventional plot that suffers from the new streaming formula, built around doom-scrolling Gen Zs with hummingbird attention spans. Each episode follows a lateral plot progression, rehashing the same limited number of beats with minimal variation beyond the setting, only to wait until the final five minutes to serve up what the showrunners undoubtedly hope is bait tantalizing enough to entice viewers to click on “Play Next.”

The ultimate result is a show that spends seventy-five percent of its runtime spinning its wheels, doling out just enough last-minute bait to keep the autoplay gods appeased. It’s not the worst thing Marvel has produced in recent years—but that’s a remarkably low bar, and Wonder Man clears it without ever reaching for anything higher.

WOKE REPORT

White Elephant

• I don’t think that anyone sane would argue that casting a black actor as a character that has been white in every iteration since its creation in the 60s isn’t woke. Of course it is. It’s textbook DEI. Here’s why our Woke-O-Meter score might be disappointing to some of you.
  • That’s it. There’s no other woke nonsense, or at least Hollywood is a perfect setting for it. Yeah, there’s a lot of diversity and an inordinate number of women in the background (there aren’t many main characters), but it’s set in Hollywood. Do any of you not believe that that’s what the landscape looks like there?
    • Other than that, there’s seemingly no agenda-driven messaging. Wonder Man isn’t downtrodden because of racism. He and Ben Kingsley aren’t in a gay relationship. Nothing. Sure, there’s a scene in which an arthouse director pairs off men competing for a role into improv scene partners, and he makes one man in each group play a woman, but it’s supposed to be funny (it’s not), and… again it’s Hollywood.