Through six decades of comic books, Marvel has amassed a staggering number of characters with rich backstories from which to pull content for its ever-expanding movie empire. It’s also a great opportunity to revisit origins and identities and rework them to showcase cultures that weren’t always prominently featured, giving wider audiences a chance to see more of themselves on screen. Wonder Man certainly does all that but falls victim to a larger MCU TV problem, which is that an entire world is created only to potentially lead to nothing more after just this one season.
Simon Williams (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) is an actor who spends all his time trying to audition and land a lasting role, but his overcommitment to understanding his character on American Horror Story gets him booted from the part. A chance meeting with Trevor Slattery (Ben Kingsley), famously known for posing as The Mandarin, gives Simon a bit more hope and direction, especially as the two work to get cast in the remake of Simon’s favorite childhood movie, Wonder Man. But Trevor is still playing a part: working on behalf of Agent P. Cleary (Arian Moayed) from the Department of Damage Control to secure him proof that Simon actually has powers and should be considered extremely dangerous.
Like other MCU shows before this, a new, previously unseen protagonist takes the lead while interacting frequently with other characters who have appeared in past projects. Kingsley gets a much bigger story here than Trevor has ever had before, and it is great fun to watch the often very serious actor, still going strong at age eighty-two, indulge the more enjoyable aspects of this light-hearted sidekick prone to grandiose speeches. Cleary also folds into the larger MCU as a supporting player here who has much more information about what he believes Simon to be than Simon himself does.
Marketed on billboards as an eight-episode series (an usual sight to see so explicitly while sitting in traffic), Wonder Man is heavy on the exposition, with roughly half-hour installments following him as he only occasionally uses or even acknowledges his powers and instead leans into fulfilling his dream of making it big as an actor. It’s easy to feel bad for him since he’s being strung along by multiple elements yet remains so committed to the idea that it can actually happen for him. At times, it feels like a buddy comedy as Simon and Trevor develop a friendship based in part on delusion but also on a shared appreciation for a craft which hasn’t gotten either of them very far.
Like She-Hulk: Attorney-at-Law or Agatha All Along, one season of fun and drama ultimately appears to lead nowhere, with no plans for the show to continue and the lead character to show up again, with a brief cameo in a giant crossover project the only distant hope of a return. Unlike those two shows, however, Wonder Man doesn’t even really get a chance to shine throughout the entirety of this show, with Simon still unaware of his potential and how to harness it. It’s the ultimate missed opportunity, closing itself off from getting to the meat of its story with what only ends up feeling like a filler introduction. Jumping right into the action with Simon at least slightly more aware of what he can do would have been much more fulfilling, and it’s a disappointment to think that so much has invested in this character not to merit a more worthwhile heroic showcase.
Despite what won’t be, there’s still something decent here, thanks largely to Abdul-Mateen. He’s enjoyed a much more rewarding career than Simon, with an Emmy win for Watchmen, a key role in The Trial of the Chicago 7, and the chance to take over for the iconic Laurence Fishburne in The Matrix Resurrections. He does his best to make Simon feel real and raw in this send-up of the film and television industry, which also features certain actors playing versions of themselves. There are glimmers of greatness and promise to be found throughout this show’s first and likely only season, including a standalone flashback episode that’s difficult to shake, but there’s so much more that’s suggested and invited that the experience of getting through the entire thing, potentially in one sitting, is in the end a letdown.
Series grade: 6/10
