A Marvel must-watch for everyone but MCU fans

But that’s exactly what makes Wonder Man one of the most compelling, purely enjoyable shows in Marvel Studios’ roster. It isn’t aimed at same-old same-old hero-villain clashes, or at teeing up the next saga. Co-creators Destin Daniel Cretton (Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings) and Andrew Guest (Community), operating under the “more grounded stories with less homework” Marvel Spotlight banner, offer up the rarest thing in the Marvel playbook: a story that’s unique, personal, character-focused, and designed to stand on its own.

Series star Yahya Abdul-Mateen II has already done his time as a far more explosive superhero (in Damon Lindelof’s Watchmen) and a much more traditional supervillain (as Black Manta in Aquaman and Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom). In Wonder Man, he isn’t super at all. His character, Los Angeles actor Simon Williams, is a struggling day player with a habit of overthinking and overrehearsing the small roles he gets. He’s obviously coming from a place of sincerity and anxiety rather than ego, but that doesn’t make him any less of a nuisance during productions, as he pins down directors and screenwriters to quibble over every minor aspect of his characters, from his word choice to his lighting to his props.

Simon’s other big issue is an uncontrolled talent for destruction. When he gets emotionally overwrought, objects around him shake and sometimes shatter. That isn’t particularly useful for a superhero, but there’s no sign that Simon has any interest in heroism. He just wants the career break every hustler in Hollywood is looking for, the audition that will finally make him famous enough to maintain a sustainable career. If he’s ever outed as having a superpower, though, his acting career will be over, due to a studio initiative called “the Doorman Clause.” (That title, and the reasoning behind it, doesn’t emerge until halfway through the series, in a raucous flashback episode that’s one of the show’s many highlights.)

While licking his wounds after his latest career setback, Simon spots disgraced actor Trevor Slattery (Ben Kingsley) in a movie theater showing John Schlesinger’s Midnight Cowboy, and chats him up. Trevor, Wonder Man’s main nod to MCU’s larger continuity, was a down-and-out actor and addict himself when he agreed to impersonate a terrorist leader called The Mandarin as part of a scheme seen in 2013’s Iron Man III. He launched a small redemption arc in Cretton’s Shang-Chi, and now he’s back in Hollywood, looking for work. Learning that Trevor’s about to audition for Wonder Man, a revival of a cheesy superhero franchise, Simon sets out to get into that audition by any means necessary. It isn’t just that he wants to work with the director, a quirky, well-respected genius; Wonder Man holds particular family significance for Simon, and the possibility of actually playing the role in a reboot leaves him frantic.

Wonder Man is largely concerned with the life of an L.A. actor trying to make it big in Hollywood: The dispiriting auditions. The long dry spells between gigs. Getting work, but being a little-valued, easily replaced part of an indifferent mechanism. Making audition tapes. Competing with friends, or dealing with the jealousy and resentment when their careers take off. Trying to get the attention of a busy agent who’s more focused on newer and hotter talent. Trying to anticipate what a powerful director needs, and become that thing. Doing all this while hiding a secret, dangerous power is just a comparatively small wrinkle in a story that often feels more like Robert Altman’s The Player than like Iron Man or a Spider-Man movie.

But there are significant wrinkles to this story, too. Trevor has an ugly secret he’s keeping from Simon, which complicates their budding friendship. And Cretton and Guest do an excellent job of turning that friendship into something viewers can root for the same way they’d root for the Avengers to take down Thanos. Simon and Trevor both desperately need each other: Simon needs Trevor’s chill attitude and industry experience to help him navigate his own anxious tendency to sabotage himself, while Trevor needs someone who respects him, likes him, and sees him as a mentor, rather than a washed-up loser and an international joke. Their mutual vulnerability and hunger for attachment puts Wonder Man among the MCU’s most appealingly human outings.

The series plays out with more humor than thrills, especially during an extended cameo from a well-established actor playing himself as one of Trevor’s much more successful former friends. There are a few action scenes, particularly in the flashback episode that explains the Doorman Clause, and in the series’ most disposable subplot, a silly, time-wasting distraction involving a blackmail tape and a stolen motorcycle. But at its heart, Wonder Man is about Simon and Trevor, and how they navigate their shared passion for movies, classic monologues, and acting not primarily as a route to fame or riches, but as a calling Trevor claims is the most important job in the world.

Wonder Man does bring in a number of elements that could resurface in later MCU projects. Simon’s older brother Eric (Demetrius Grosse), here just a judgmental scold who wants Simon to quit his unprofitable acting career and get into the insurance game, is a full-on supervillain in the comics. Arian Moayed (Succession) resurfaces as Agent Cleary, the predatory government hack he played in Ms. Marvel and Spider-Man: No Way Home. The Doorman flashback has an important contribution from Roxxon, the dangerous corporation that’s been a significant part of Marvel’s comics universe since the 1960s, and has been referenced in more than a dozen MCU shows and movies.

Image: Marvel Studios

But the show’s ties to the greater MCU are mostly negligible Easter eggs. Like Simon’s constant fears about his powers, those links are just a reminder that in this setting, superheroes and villains are a routine part of the landscape. The way Wonder Man operates as a ground-level story that isn’t entangled in MCU continuity is exactly what the Marvel Spotlight projects are meant to be — but the previous show under that banner, Echo, was much less distinctive and experimental, and much more entwined with significant Marvel characters. Wonder Man is a much more appealing and exciting proof of concept. But it doesn’t seem like Disney has much faith in the show, given its minimal marketing support and the single-day streaming dump for every episode of a show that feels like it was originally designed to spark weekly speculation, conversation, and anticipation.

That’s particularly frustrating given that Wonder Man is one of Marvel Studios’ most appealing shows to date. Avengers: Doomsday is clearly meant as a corrective for Marvel’s superhero-fatigue-related box-office slump, but this show is arguably a better direction altogether: a creator-driven departure that does something entirely new, different, and fun with this setting, instead of trying to copycat the franchise’s past successes. It’s exactly what the MCU most needed: a new idea for what a Marvel show could look like.

All eight episodes of Wonder Man debut on Disney Plus on Jan. 27.