‘Wonder Man’: Has Marvel actually made a good TV series?

We are going to make the last movie on earth… because no one will have the balls to make another.” This is a pronouncement of promise made by an esoteric fictional filmmaker, an auteur taking on a superhero movie with lofty, genre-transcending ambitions. It is also a joke, coming in a great episode of Marvel’s new series Wonder Man, now streaming on JioHotstar. Ah, Marvel. Remember when they started making superhero movies, each setting a benchmark, each getting more interesting and more human, movies that promised and delivered us actual events… how long ago all that feels.

Today’s Marvel productions have the absolute opposite mission: to make a movie that—far from being untoppable—can most swiftly be followed up with another. Each Marvel production, built on decades of comic book lore, is meant not only for a viewer to enjoy but provide just enough stimulus to make them watch more Marvel films and shows. This endless circle of content has created superhero fatigue, leading most of us (including me, a writer with an unwisely large Spider-Man tattoo) away from Marvel’s tedious attempts to hawk more things of varying quality. With the comics, I read the ones where I like the storytelling or the art or the style and ignore the others. It’s that simple.

Is Marvel still capable of making something good? Something that stands alone, something that is not merely place-setting for a “Universe”? Wonder Man, created by Destin Daniel Cretton and Andrew Guest, is a smart and grounded superhero series that comes without a watchlist of homework. This feels, quite authentically, like a dramedy about a struggling actor—who just happens to have superpowers. It helps massively that he is played by the remarkable Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, who creates a compelling and true character, a gruff overthinker who wins over our empathy very gradually. It helps also that Sir Ben Kingsley, speaking like a bad John Lennon impersonator, is his only friend.

This is, therefore, a series about auditions. About actors who learn their lines and perform breathing exercises and wait hungrily for callbacks. If anything, Wonder Man is reminiscent of Bill Hader’s Barry (JioHotstar), where a professional assassin decides to become an actor and then do whatever it takes to hide his actual talent. All while being trained by a wise old mentor.

Simon Williams is the kind of actor who nails his audition tapes, but is so maddeningly obsessed with character details and backstory that he routinely drives directors and producers up the wall. Abdul-Mateen makes Williams immediately believable, letting us see that his anxiety and his overthinking are actually a cover. He is so troubled by his superpowers, and the possibility of their being discovered, that he falls back on lines from Pretty Woman when asked to improvise a relationship. His own life hasn’t held much that he considers worthy of repeating. He has, for instance, just one friend.

What a friend, though. Kingsley is having a rollicking time. When I say no homework is required, I must caveat it by warning that Kingsley’s character Trevor Slattery exists within the Marvel Universe: Slattery, an actor, pretended to be a terrorist called The Mandarin in Iron Man 3, and has appeared in a few other films. This barely matters. The new series does a wonderful job of explaining just how a floundering and desperate English actor got roped into an evil gig, and is now doing whatever it takes to keep out of trouble. And memorise his lines.

At eight episodes, weighing in at a half-hour apiece, it’s a breezy watch, and I wasn’t prepared for the elegantly handled metaphor at its core. By keeping the superheroics themselves closeted and treated as an illegal, shameful secret, Wonder Man likens them to anything considered unlikeable within the public space: this could well be about Hollywood’s blacklisting of Communists or the way Muslim actors are increasingly finding themselves pigeonholed in Hindi cinema or why so many popular stars pretend to be straight. Your superpowers are what make you different, and vice versa.

Yet, as Wonder Man reminds, you are not defined by them. This is an intelligent, well-considered series with heart and style. There is a sense of a larger universe but the show is trying awfully hard not to make things go boom. There is greater precariousness in finding a location for the two unlikely protagonists to record an audition for an indie movie. One of Kingsley’s top moments, for instance, is where he patiently, and in real time, explains a breathing exercise to the hero who won’t stop thinking of everything that can go wrong. There are times when we worry about learning our lines even when we don’t yet have lines to learn.

In one black-and-white episode, a character says: “It’s better to have no cookie than a disappointing cookie, you know what I’m saying?” This is a tremendous line. A cookie promises delight and joy and satisfaction, and when those aren’t delivered, the disappointment is more than if the promise never existed. Marvel has, for several years now, been selling us disappointing cookies. Wonder Man is worth dipping in milk.

Streaming tip of the week:

In the mood for more Marvel? The four-episode animated series Marvel Zombies (JioHotstar) is properly gory and feels deliciously inappropriate, with Giant-Man harvesting Black Panther’s limbs to feed Zombie Scarlet Witch, and Zombie Thanos turning Groot and Rocket Raccoon to dust. A wickedly good time.