Is Marvel even still relevant anymore? They keep throwing out random shows like they are. Its not really clear where, if anywhere, Wonder Man fits in the “big picture”, he may even just be a random one off since this show is branded Marvel Spotlight. Werewolf By Night was also a Marvel Spotlight show. It doesn’t seem like its intended to be a part of anything more either. Wonder Man has been trying to.be a thing for a while though and his power set, which we don’t see a lot of, is a bit more versatile than “Werewolf”, so maybe.
Way back during.Guardians of the Galaxy 2, the one with Kurt Russel, there were plans to cast Nathan Fillion as Wonder Man. I believe there was even some cut scenes where movie posters featuring Fillion as Simon Wilson, Wonder Man’s alias, in a fake movie. That was ten years ago. I guess everyone moved on, I could definitely see Fillion in this role, but maybe maybe they decided he was getting too old for it. Especially with the glacial pace Marvel is bringing its heroes back.
Anyway, looking over his Wiki page, the comic character has quite a wild past, though almost none of it shows in this series. He was an Avengers villain, when they “killed” him, his brother, Eric, who does show up in the series, becomes the Grim Reaper to fight the Avengers. Wonder Man was a founding member of the West Coast Avengers. This feels like the most likely direction they would head if they brough this MCU version back, the MCU already feels like its easing a WC Avengers. He also has a thing for Wanda, and was the mind imprint used by Ultron to create Vision.
His powers are kind of a generic Super Man style power set, strong, invulnerable, create ionic energy bursts, sometimes flight. I mention all this because I kind of like to know where these characters are coming from on their MCU adaptions.
Its also worth noting, almost none of this ends up being relevant to this series. Before even watching the show, I knew it was going to follow the standard pattern of these MCU shows where maybe we see a brief glimpse of ability, but something de-powers them or they have to lay low then in the last episode we actually get a suit and see abilities.
That’s pretty much how this series went. They introduce the “Doorman Policy” about not letting super powered people act, and Simon Wilson wants to act, and also Damage Control is looking for him.
But there it was, the classic MCU power restriction plot device.
Oh yeah, I didn’t mention that in Simon Wilson’s comic history up there, he is an actor. Its basically his thing, for his normal life. The bulk of the series revolves around Simon Wilson paling around with Trevor Slattery of Mandarin Fame as they try to land a role in the new Wonder Man movie. In universe, Wonder Man was a cheesy 80s hero show, and Hollywood is making a new modern version.
It may feel like I was dumping on the show a bit above, but I actually really enjoyed this show. I already enjoy these sort of, Hollywood makes fun of Hollywood style shows, and thats basically what Wonder Man is. What really makes it work is Simon and Trevor, or more specifically, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II and Sir Ben Kingsley, I suppose. They are so, visually mismatched, and even as characters, background history mismatched, but they work so well off each other it really makes the show work wonderfully.
They schlup around Hollywood getting into messed up situations while trying to make their callbacks for the Wonder Man auditions. We get a lot of little history and backstory moments here and there. Trevor gets constantly recognized as The Mandarin terrorist. I also really appreciate shows like this where the actors end up playing a character, who also play another character. We get “everyday Simon Wilson” who is constantly jittery and nervous, but then we also get “Actor Simon Wilson”, who is much more cool and collected in front of the camera.
There are also a lot of nice little throw back moments scattered in the story, which I always enjoy.
And yes, at the end, we get that little glimpse at Wonder Man’s actual powers. Though there is no real big bad fight or anything. We also don’t ever really see that much direct show of power. We probably see more of Doorman’s power during the episode that explains why the Doorman Policy exists than we see of Simon’s powers, which feels a little weird.
I am not going to go too much into spoilers, but its a good show, though it takes a few episodes to get its footing.
