The idea of the superhero specialists at Marvel Studios producing a TV show about the making of a superhero movie is both clever and inevitable. It also sounds potentially dreadful.
Marvel shows and films have struggled with their insularity in recent years; they don’t exactly need more chances to pretend that superheroes are the center of all available universes. Moreover, the MCU has never really excelled at parody, nevermind satire. Case in point: When their new show “Wonder Man,” around halfway through its eight-episode run, offers a few glimpses at a pair of Hollywood heist movies starring Josh Gad (?!), they’re almost spitefully inaccurate, even as broad pastiche.
It feels like one more example of how little these superhero creators think about the movie genres they supposedly mine for their work. Besides, if HBO and the creators of “Veep” could only manage a hit-and-miss take on satirizing superhero-cinema satire with “The Franchise,” what chance does a third-tier MCU show have?
The nicest surprise of “Wonder Man” is that most of it doesn’t attempt satire in the first place. Yes, its behind-the-scenes material is a little cringe-y and clumsily shorthanded — at one point, a character reads a supposed New York Times hit piece from a supposedly venerated culture writer; real journalists may breathe a sigh of relief upon realizing that no, screenwriters aren’t much good at imitating the tone or language of their celeb profiles. But while it would be easy enough for Simon Williams (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II), a struggling actor who takes his process so seriously that we see him blowing an “American Horror Story” walk-on in the first episode, to serve as a caricature of artistic pretension, the show isn’t making fun of him. Simon loves movies, and by all evidence is quite a good actor. Eventually, it becomes clear that at least part of his tight control issues (and accompanying nerves) grow out of his need to keep his formidable superpowers under wraps.
We learn here that actors with genuine superpowers are considered more or less uninsurable and therefore unemployable in the MCU. One of the episodes even stands alone, akin to a single-issue comic story, to explain that rule’s origin in greater detail — probably more than necessary, to be honest. The de facto ban on superpowered performers creates additional inner turmoil when Simon hustles his way into an unlikely audition for the role of Wonder Man in a remake of a famous ‘80s superhero picture. Walking him through the process is Trevor Slattery (Sir Ben Kingsley), who MCU fans will remember as the once-dissolute veteran actor who “played” the Mandarin, a fake terrorist concocted for “Iron Man 3.”
Trevor has a secret, too: He’s being forced by the government to spy on Simon and find evidence of his potentially dangerous powers. At the risk of sounding like a Marvel director on a press tour, this dynamic gives their relationship a hint of “Donnie Brasco,” only here it’s the low-level veteran of a chosen field who’s actually a double agent spying on his younger counterpart. The movie also, somewhat loftily, brings up “Midnight Cowboy” among its otherwise Disney-saturated reference points, providing what is almost certainly the first glimpse of a once-X-rated movie in a Marvel project.
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The Simon-Trevor relationship is very much the heart of the series, and notable in part for what it’s not: It’s not material for yet another odd-couple buddy comedy with canned bicker-quips, and it’s not one element of an oversized ensemble that the show has already decided audiences will find delightful. Instead, series creators Destin Daniel Cretton and Andrew Guest maintain a surprisingly small-scale and affecting friendship between two people who, whatever other secrets they carry, genuinely love the craft of acting and would be happiest getting to focus their lives on it, if only the circumstances would allow. Abdul-Mateen, who in a convenient metatextual touch arrives with superhero-movie experience via the “Aquaman” movies — he played the villainous but empathetic Black Manta — never undercuts the earnestness of his intensity. Kingsley, for his part, draws Trevor back from potential cartoonishness and makes him a touchingly conflicted figure whose self-consciously colorful stories originate from genuine enthusiasm.
As a character study, “Wonder Man” is uncommonly quiet and focused for the MCU. It still, however, suffers a bit from a common Marvel miniseries problem: a short season of half-hour episodes (especially dropped all at once, as these are) winds up feeling more like an oddly paced movie than a TV show. This in turn exacerbates how odd it is to spend so much more time in the company of Simon and Trevor than, say, a marquee character like Doctor Strange or Carol Danvers. The aforementioned one-off episode (shot, for reasons unclear, in black-and-white) mitigates that distended-movie feeling a bit, but it’s also not a particularly strong installment. 200-plus minutes is probably more screentime than this story ultimately requires.
The show also delves into a clear analogy for closeted actors once forced to keep their sexualities under wraps for fear of reprisal. But as with a lot of superhero narratives, a sense of wish-fulfillment broadens that metaphor into near-meaninglessness by the time the show is through. That’s one reason among several that “Wonder Man” doesn’t feel fleshed out into a fully satisfying series. (That, and no truly great show would hire Olivia Thirlby to do that old familiar Marvel sad-ex routine.)
As an experiment in repressing the company’s worst tendencies, though, “Wonder Man” is moderately successful.
“Wonder Man” premieres Tuesday, Jan. 27, on Disney+.