Wonder Man Review: Marvel's Least Traditional Show Features A Beautiful Bromance

The marketing for the Disney+ miniseries "Wonder Man" has given the impression that it's Marvel Television's attempt at a meta satire about show business and the superhero movie industry — a bit of self-mockery to get ahead of the outside mockery they already get from the likes of Apple TV's Emmy-winning hit "The Studio" or HBO's much less successful "The Franchise."

I suggest you put those expectations aside: the actual series is barely interested in satirizing Hollywood and not really interested in satirizing superhero movies at all. There are a couple of major cameos from celebs playing parodies of themselves, and one conversation where prestige director Von Kovak (Zlatko Burić) uses David Cronenberg's "The Fly" as artistic justification for doing a superhero movie remake — presumably in a world where superheroes are real, the "remake" part is more frowned upon than the "superhero" part — but that's basically it. The trailer's lines saying Von Kovak is "fighting superhero fatigue" are pretty much false advertising for the actual plot.

"Fighting superhero fatigue" might more accurately describe the mission statement for the "Wonder Man" series itself, since it's completely different from anything else in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It's a grounded character study about aspiring actor Simon Williams (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II), a fairly average, not particularly heroic guy who just happens to be hiding some rather dangerous superpowers. He doesn't fight any supervillains — but his only real friend is an actor who played one, the fake "Mandarin" Trevor Slattery (Ben Kingsley). Simon and Trevor meet for the first time at a screening of "Midnight Cowboy," and while a Marvel Disney+ show is never gonna match that X-rated Oscar winner's grit and sexuality, it's a thematically appropriate reference for a series that's, at heart, a buddy movie bromance.

Perhaps because of the need to adjust expectations, the first couple of episodes of "Wonder Man" feel a little slow. Where other stories about actors focus on the drama on set, Simon's life is shown in all the awkward waiting periods between auditions and callbacks and so on; it's a long time before he actually gets the role of his childhood favorite superhero Wonder Man. The bits in these first few episodes that try to be more like "The Studio" end up feeling the most forced. For example: Simon lavishing praise on a fictional director for real shows "American Horror Story," "Sons of Anarchy," and "Castle Rock" (all conveniently streaming on Hulu on Disney+!), or instantly dated jokes about a third "M3GAN" movie. Contemporary real world references in the MCU always get a bit weird — I don't want to believe "PizzaGate" conspiracies became a thing in a universe where Captain America purged HYDRA from the government!

Yet even while the show's struggling to find its rhythm, the characters and performances are instantly compelling. Simon is the type of actor who wants to know everything about whatever character he's portraying, even if it's just for a bit part with two lines. He's unable to leave anything up to instinct because, if he lets his emotions run too high, his powers will activate and people could get hurt. He's like Shigeto Kageyama from "Mob Psycho 100" if Shigeto collected Criterion DVDs and didn't have Reigen and friends helping him grow up relatively well-adjusted.

Trevor, meanwhile, gets to be the Lawrence Olivier asking Simon's Dustin Hoffman "My boy, why don't you try just acting?" – which is kind of funny if you think about it because plot-wise, Trevor's the Hoffman character in our "Midnight Cowboy" comparison. In the press notes, head writer Andrew Guest explained this show exists because director Destin Daniel Cretton loved working with Ben Kingsley on "Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings" so much that he wanted any excuse to do more with Kingsley's character, and how could you blame him? Trevor's MCU introduction in "Iron Man 3" might have been controversial among fans (I maintain it was a great twist right from the start), but Kingsley's humor in this evolving role is an unabashed delight.

The high point of "Wonder Man," however, barely involves the main characters at all. The fourth episode, titled "Doorman," is a weird little one-off story shot in black and white, with only a tangential connection to the primary storyline. Byron Bowers stars as a night club doorman who after a freak accident with some toxic waste becomes Doorman, a superhero with the power to slip through closed doors and slip other people through doors using his body. His strange power is in fact useful for saving lives, but after being hired as Josh Gad's bodyguard and asked to cameo in the heist film "Cash Grab," he gets pigeonholed into profiting off his 15 minutes of fame to continually diminishing returns. With its offbeat humor and a bit of body horror, "Doorman" is reminiscent of the great experimental episodes of shows like "Atlanta" or "Master of None," and the strongest argument for why "Wonder Man" needed to be a TV series as opposed to just a long movie.

The series' avoidance of the standard MCU cliches in favor of sticking to its own rhythms continues all the way through the ending. The final episodes of even more offbeat Marvel shows like "WandaVision" or "Loki" always had to return to some semblance of formula in their finales, either through big beat-em-ups or complicated set-ups for future projects, but "Wonder Man" is mercifully self-contained and committed to its grounded character-driven style to the end. There is, unfortunately, one plot element in the series finale that I could not find the slightest bit believable (certainly not in a universe close enough to ours that "PizzaGate" was a thing). My frustration with that twist — and with the missed opportunities for sharper satire the twist's failure points to — has me docking my overall rating for the series by at least half a point. And yet I'll tell you, I still found myself feeling giddy in the show's final minutes.

All eight episodes of "Wonder Man" stream on Disney+ January 27.