Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man star Hudson Thames left many eyebrows raised last week after his comments about fearing the Disney Plus series would be “annoying and woke.” During a subsequent Reddit AMA, series creator Jeff Trammell was quick to start doing damage control, and he insisted that Thames had misspoken. But even in its most charitable interpretation, Thames’ statement was pretty odd considering how being annoying and constantly vigilant about injustice are kind of Spider-Man’s whole schtick.
We may never know exactly what Thames meant or whether his feelings could have been expressed more thoughtfully. But what’s funny about the entire situation is how Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man is, in fact, one of those “woke” shows you’re always hearing culturally conservative types harp on about. It celebrates multiculturalism by treating diversity as a simple fact of the world Peter Parker exists in. And the series’s “wokeness” is honestly one of the best things about it.
There’s a lot of the Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man series that rings familiar if you’ve spent time reading Marvel’s comics or watched any of the studio’s multiple TV shows or films revolving around the webhead. It’s another story about Peter Parker (Thames), a dorky kid from Queens trying to balance a double life as both a high school student and a superhero. Some of the series’s worldbuilding details are a little different than what you might be used to; Aunt May (Kari Wahlgren) loses her husband before Peter is bitten by a strange spider, for example. But the show hits many of the classic Spider-Man beats, like Peter’s trademark bad luck and his aptitude for building gadgets like his webshooters.
The show’s biggest changes come by way of the friends and rivals Peter makes as he bounces back and forth between classes at school and an internship at Norman Osborn’s (Colman Domingo) Oscorp. More traditional Spider-Man characters like Harry Osborn (Zeno Robinson) and Lonnie Lincoln (Eugene Byrd) are also in the mix. But this Peter is best buds with longtime Runaways fixture Nico Minoru (Grace Song), and both have crushes on Pearl Pangan (Cathy Ang) — a newer character who first appeared in Marvel’s War of the Realms comics event back in 2019.
Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man is not the first instance of Marvel diversifying the cast of supporting characters around Peter Parker in order to make Spider-Man stories more inclusive and reflective of what life can be like in New York City. Those changes were part of what made 2008’s The Spectacular Spider-Man animated series and Marvel / Sony’s recent live-action Spider-Man films feel so modern compared to Stan Lee and Steve Ditko’s early Spider-Man comics from the ’60s in which the vast majority of characters were white.
Your Friendly Neighborhood’s diversity isn’t the only thing it has going for it. The show’s action, though stutter-y at times, is fun and works well with its cel-shaded, comic book-inspired aesthetic that often presents shots as if they were panels from a physical book. But the series’s slight adjustments to Peter Parker’s world are what gives its story a level of depth and thoughtfulness — which could be considered “woke” — that is surprising to see from Marvel.
It bears repeating that, even though the term “woke” has become a racist / sexist / homophobic catchall dogwhistle often used by bigots as a pejorative, the concept of staying woke originated within Black communities and refers to the importance of being able to recognize the societal dangers Black people face. Featuring characters who are Black, or merely non-white, does not automatically mean that a film or TV show has anything to say about things like policing, crime, and structural inequality. But Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man certainly does as it starts showing you what makes this Peter Parker more of a street-level vigilante than any of his big-screen counterparts.
Even though certain characters’ names give you an idea of the more fantastical nonsense Peter’s going to end up dealing with as the season continues, one of the first bits of heroism we see from him in the premiere is a quick moment where he brings a thief back to a pizza joint she’s just robbed. The thief, a white woman, tells Peter that she’s become desperate after losing her job. Peter has no way to know if that story is true, but as part of a family dealing with their own money problems, he can understand how that kind of loss pushes people to the edge. That moment contrasts sharply with another scene where Lonnie, who is Black, is racially profiled in quick succession by both the police on the street and a random white woman on the train as he makes his way home.
Through that juxtaposition of moments, Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man is actually saying a lot about how different styles of policing communities can lead to drastically different outcomes for their populations. The show does not need to depict the police attacking Lonnie to illustrate how racial profiling is a kind of violence in and of itself that causes real harm to the people who experience it. We also don’t need to know every detail of the pizza thief’s life to grasp the difficulty of her circumstances and see how Spider-Man was able to peacefully resolve a criminal situation by leading with empathy rather than suspicion.
Before the concept of wokeness was co-opted and weaponized by the right, it was very easy to understand as being aware of and attentive to social inequalities that shape our world. Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man might not explicitly spell them out, but those ideas are baked into its take on Peter Parker. A lot of this — the focus on community, the desire to help rather than penalize — has always been part of the traditional Spider-Man brand. And Disney’s new show is doing an excellent job of making sure you don’t forget that.
