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 If
things had turned out differently, one of America's most famous superheroes
could have been racing across our screens this fall. But the gods were against
Wonder Woman, NBC's superhero show. And it's easy to see why.
Thanks to the efforts of Comic Book Man, I've seen the unaired Wonder Woman
pilot, and as it turns out, it's rather worse than I expected. It's bad in all
the ways that I was expecting, but it's also bad in other, more fundamental,
ways.
The funny thing is, you sort of expect this show to have a lot of soppiness and
a lot of "working woman juggling career and personal life" trauma — because it's
David E. Kelley. But in a strange bit of character redefining, he's built in the
concept that Wonder Woman has two secret identities. So she has her "corporate
boss-lady" identity, dealing with meetings, and then her "lonely single woman"
identity, whose biggest problem is creating a Facebook profile for herself. So
in the pilot, the world knows that Wonder Woman is actually Diana Themyscira but
what they don't know is that she is ALSO Diana Prince who lives in a meager
apartment with her cat Sylvester (get it?) and spends her evenings eating snacks
while watching The Notebook on cable.
But the thing you don't expect from this pilot is how tone-deaf it is about
superheroes, and how smug and brutal Wonder Woman is. You get the impression,
watching this thing, that nobody has ever really read a good superhero comic (or
a comic in general), or gotten the slightest idea why superheroes work. There's
a lot of discussion of whether Wonder Woman is an unlawful vigilante — which she
clearly is, without a doubt — and we constantly see her torturing, murdering and
trampling people, without any concern for the law. One particularly harrowing
scene shows WW killing a guard by using his nightstick to impale him in the
throat.
As for any talk of the characters origin, there is precious little. It appears
to be that she's an Amazon who has come to the world of men and is using her
powers to make a difference. She says as much to Steve Trevor at one point, and
someone else makes a mention that she's not actually human later, alluding to
her "made-of-clay" origin. Also, there's a ton of ancient Greek sculpture all
over Themyscira Industries, in case you forget that she's technically an Amazon.
But other than that, nothing is specifically stated. It's a bit awkward.
Watching the Wonder Woman pilot makes you appreciate The Cape, NBC's doomed
superhero show from last year, a lot more. Both shows are trying to do similar
things, but The Cape at least had some relatable characters and a better sense
of humor. Not that the Wonder Woman pilot isn't screamingly funny in parts — it
definitely is.
For example, there's still the infamous scene where Wonder Woman argues with her
marketing team about the ginormous breasts of her action figure, which now ends
with her shouting, "We are not marketing my tits!" But then later, she shows off
those same breasts to a security guard who's blocking a room she wants to get
into, saying "Do you like my outfit? This outfit opens doors for me."
There's also the big confrontation with the evil pharmaceutical company head,
Veronica Cale, played by the glamorous Elizabeth Hurley — who looks at Diana and
says, in extreme closeup, "The pharmaceutical industry has Congress by the
balls, and as you can imagine, their balls come particularly easy to me." Why
their balls are so accessible to her, in particular, is left as an exercise for
the audience.
Given that this is a David E. Kelley produced pilot, it's amazing how much of
the “law” portions are off kilter. Diana holds a huge press conference to spill
the beans on the Cale plot. Diana accuses Cale of everything from drug
trafficking to illegal human experiments. But then says that she cannot prove
any of it. Also, after WW tortures the warehouse location of Cale's secret base
out of a thug, she tells a police detective. The cop very specifically tells
Wonder Woman she can't go into warehouse location without a warrant, because
then they won't be able to legally prosecute. I don't what's more ridiculous --
that this comes immediately after WW tortures a dude for info -- or that Wonder
Woman actually decides to suddenly play by the U.S. legal system. But it gets
better! Because later, while Wonder Woman is angrily flying around in her tiny
jet, the cop calls her and tells her if she breaks into Cale's warehouse, it'll
be a crime scene, and then they won't need a warrant! The place will be a crime
scene because Wonder Woman broke in, thus making her the criminal. The problem
with this plan occurs to neither the cop, nor Wonder Woman. Even more
astoundingly, even if somehow this plan was tenable, why didn't they just do it
as soon as they had the location? No one bothers to ask.
Meanwhile, African American women follow Wonder Woman around, worrying about her
feelings and begging for her help in avenging their poor victimized sons. And
everybody worries about Wonder Woman's mental state and whether she's lonesome
and whether she needs a man, all the time — even when she's facing criminal
charges for beating up tons of people without any justification.
And she spends rather a lot of time in her "corporate boss-lady" identity, with
a huge office overlooking a giant hive of worker bees, all of them apparently
toiling away to merchandise her image for profit. All of the profits from her
crass self-promotion go to help her beat up more people in her spare time, we're
told.
It's really very jarring. David E. Kelley boils down superheroes to a shriveled
core of violence, arrogance and meanness, like the worst of early 1990s Image
Comics heroes. Plain and simple. Wonder Woman is not supposed to kill. The
character is a role model. She is not meant to be a brightly costumed Batman.
And then to humanize his main character again, he adds a stock set of "lonely
career woman" tropes that are lifted directly from all his lawyer shows. We've
seen some pretty odd takes on the admittedly versatile superhero archetypes from
Hollywood over the years — but Wonder Woman might just be the oddest and worst.
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