Wonder Man
For those of us who follow pop culture, January 2026 marked a significant anniversary. It was five years ago last month that Disney and Marvel premiered, with great fanfare and a tremendous marketing push, their inaugural streaming collaboration, WandaVision. A glossy puzzle box of a show, WandaVision enthralled audiences and reviewers alike, inspiring fan theories, thinkpieces, and memes (remember when "what is grief, if not love persevering?" was the most moving line of dialogue ever uttered on screen?). And, because entertainment news in the 2020s is always also business news, WandaVision was a critical component in Disney, Marvel, and the MCU's realignment post-Endgame. It was intended as a proof of concept for a brave new world in which every movie studio in Hollywood had their own streaming platform, in which mega-franchises could stretch across movie and television screens, and in which a franchise like the MCU could continue growing endlessly (and also, in which a measly global pandemic could do nothing to one's stock price).
The fact that the five year anniversary of WandaVision has been allowed to pass with absolutely no acknowledgment is hardly our first bit of proof that pretty much all of these assumptions were misguided. We've spent the last five years watching the MCU wind down into something listless and inessential, with each new movie and show promising to revitalize the franchise and reengage audiences with what was once the world's most dominant pop culture phenomenon, and instead proving, yet again, that the spark has gone. The problem isn't even that the MCU is bad now (though quite a lot of what Marvel is serving up these days is pretty bad). It's that it mostly feels quite perfunctory. The MCU worked because it was fresh and engaging, full of characters we cared about and connected with, and situations that, while hardly original, had clearly had some thought and care put into them. What it's been putting out in recent years feels, in contrast, recycled; new faces repeating old stories, all with the aim of propping up yet another billion-dollar team-up movie—a movie whose prospects are now apparently so dire, Marvel has resorted to nakedly assuring us that characters who had already been retired will return in it.
You know all this, of course. You knew it two or three years ago, when talking about why the MCU has faltered and whether it could course correct was still a marginally interesting topic of conversation. As someone who used to write quite a bit about this franchise—WandaVision alone occasioned 4500-word essay that is one of the most-read pieces on this blog—I realized a few years ago that I no longer had any desire to think about it critically. So the fact that I'm breaking out the MCU tag again comes as a shock to me, as much as it might to you. Five years after the premiere of WandaVision, Marvel on Disney+ has served up yet another glossy puzzle box of a show, and it is the first time in years that this franchise has once again felt fresh and engaging. Does this mean the MCU is back? Well, the fact that, unlike WandaVision, Wonder Man has premiered with relatively little fanfare, the promise that there will not be any follow-up seasons, and a full-season dump instead of a weekly release, certainly suggests that it should not be taken as a calling card for what the franchise is interested in and focused on. But this, I think, might actually lie at the heart of the show's success and appeal.
Simon Williams (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) is a struggling actor in LA. He's talented and serious about his craft—perhaps too serious. The miniseries's opening scenes find him talking himself out of a bit role on American Horror Story because of his constant questioning of his fellow actors, the episode writer, and the director; wondering, for example, whether it would make more sense for his character, a professor whose head will be bitten off by a monster after two lines of dialogue, to have a more specialized textbook on his desk. At a matinee showing of Midnight Cowboy, Simon encounters Trevor Slattery (Ben Kingsley), the down-on-his-luck actor who was half-bamboozled, half-flattered into playing the role of the arch-terrorist The Mandarin in Iron Man 3. Now back in LA to restart his acting career, Trevor reveals to Simon that the superhero Wonder Man is about to receive a modern Hollywood treatment. As the two make their way through the audition process, the older man takes the younger under his wing, imparting both practical industry tips and acting advice. Unbeknownst to Simon, however, Trevor is actually working for the department of Damage Control, who want Trevor to gather proof that Simon has dangerous superpowers, which they can use to justify locking him away.
The actual Marvel superhero Wonder Man is a rather faint presence in the show. From his wikipedia entry, he appears to be something of a utility player, starting out as a villain, having a change of heart, and then bouncing from one superhero team to the next whenever there's a vacancy in their roster. Previous MCU projects have done a lot with far less, but Wonder Man keeps our sense of its titular superhero fairly impressionistic. We get a few clips from a previous movie version from the 80s, full of chintzy costumes, hokey special effects, and over the top acting. From them, we glean that Wonder Man is haunted by his villainous past, but that his mentor Barnaby (the role Trevor is trying out for) has convinced him that he can turn over a new leaf. For the most part, however, the business of Wonder Man is the professional partnership—which eventually becomes a friendship—between Simon and Trevor.
As the two tramp across LA on a series of misadventures—trying to find the perfect place to film a self-tape audition; visiting the palatial home of Joe Pantoliano, whom Trevor blames for getting him fired from his first big role on a hospital show; and, as Trevor grows fonder of Simon and more troubled over betraying him, evading Damage Control's attentions—it becomes clear that Wonder Man is a superhero show in which superheroics are almost entirely absent, and superpowers are almost beside the point. Simon knows that he has powers, but he mostly tries to suppress and ignore them. His concern is less being arrested by Damage Control (whose interest in him is largely opportunistic; he's an easy target with which to pad their statistics and justify their budget) as being locked out of his career. Ever since DeMarr "Doorman" Davis (Byron Bowers), an enhanced person with the power to let objects and people pass through his body, ended his fifteen minutes of fame by losing his powers at the worst possible moment, Hollywood insurance agents have refused to bond any production with a superpowered person on its cast, so Simon is fanatical about concealing his powers—which, of course, only contributes to his anxiety, and affects his ability to open up on stage.
If anything, Wonder Man seems to be riding an entirely different (and arguably fresher) trend than the superhero craze, the behind-the-scenes Hollywood satire. As entertainment news has become business news, business has become more and more entertaining. And what's entertaining eventually gets made into fiction. On shows like The Franchise and The Studio, in subplots on Hacks, Only Murders in the Building, and Barry, Hollywood has increasingly been turning the camera back on itself, delving into the mechanics of movie magic, the interpersonal dynamics between minor and major players, and the forces that are changing the industry—forces that include, of course, the ubiquity of superhero movies and shows. But in Wonder Man, creators Destin Daniel Cretton and Andrew Guest make the unexpected—and for my money, extremely sensible—choice to address the superhero question only obliquely. There is no castigation of the superhero genre here, but neither is there an attempt to build it up as a modern-day mythology. Wonder Man matters to Simon because he watched and enjoyed the original movie with his father shortly before his death, but he pursues the title role so relentlessly because to him it represents a make-or-break point in his career. If he fails to get this role, after a decade of hustling, he might have to admit that despite his good looks, hard work, and talent, he is fated to be one of Hollywood's also-rans, those people for whom things just didn't come together.
Far more than superheroics, what Wonder Man ends up interested in is a series-long dialogue between Simon and Trevor about what acting is and how best to achieve it (which is also a thinly-veiled metaphor for how they've each approached their lives). Simon's process is fastidious and detail-oriented. He makes copious notes, researches obscure details about his characters, and constructs elaborate backstories for them, but Trevor insists that this is avoidance. The key to acting, he argues, is in emotion rather than preparation, putting yourself on the stage, no matter who you're playing—something that Simon, who has held himself back from true intimacy with anyone, doesn't know if he's capable of.
The key to Wonder Man's charm is that even in the thick of these high-minded discussions, the series never loses sight of the fact that acting is a fundamentally ridiculous profession. Kingsley has been making a meal out of Trevor Slattery for thirteen years, but Wonder Man really gives him an opportunity to delve into the man's inherently absurd contradictions, the fact that he proudly proclaims himself an "ack-tohr", or insists that acting is a calling, in between regaling listeners with a litany of his bad life choices and bizarre stage experiences. Abdul-Mateen is also clearly having a ball playing against his action star good looks, as he breaks into vocal exercises in the privacy of his trailer, or neurotically worries that a famously tough entertainment journalist will damn him for how he stabs his arugula salad. The partnership that develops between the two of them is half hilarious odd-couple antics, half a genuine friendship rooted in the fact that, for all their differences, they both truly love the thing they've dedicated their lives to.
It's as they shepherd and support each other through the audition process for the Wonder Man movie that it becomes clear to us just how cleverly the show has brought us full circle. Wonder Man, the character Simon is trying to get cast as, is a man with superpowers, riddled with self-doubt, who finds a mentor who teaches him to be his best self. Wonder Man, the show that we've been watching, is a story about a man with superpowers, riddled with self-doubt, who finds a mentor who teaches him to be his best self. It's just that the thing Trevor teaches Simon isn't how to be superhero, but how to play one on screen.
It's a beautifully small-scale story, one that leaves us space to care about these characters and the things they want for themselves rather than the fate of the world (and also, that hints at how ordinary people, even ordinary people with powers, go about their lives in a world that insists on classing them as either heroes or villains). And, as much as the MCU has lost its way in the last few years, I'm not sure that even in its heyday it would have had the courage to tell a story like this, without linking it to a greater megatext, or teasing that Simon and Trevor will, despite everything, end up teaming up with the Avengers. The series, in fact, ends on a scene in which Simon—utilizing one of the acting tricks Trevor has taught him—unlocks the full potential of his powers, suggesting that a second season focused on a more conventional superhero story was at least contemplated. But because Marvel is now in a state where it is winding down its non-Avengers projects and putting far fewer eggs in the streaming TV basket, Wonder Man has been released under the Spotlight umbrella—which is to say, a guaranteed miniseries.
As much as I liked Simon and Trevor and would have enjoyed seeing more of their stories, I think this is probably for the best. Wonder Man works because it refuses the sense of a greater story that has been permeating so many MCU projects, the increasingly deadening insistence that stories in this universe only matter inasmuch as they build up to an even bigger story; that nobody is ever really allowed to leave, and nothing is ever really allowed to end, so long as Disney's stock price feels a little precarious. As I said at the beginning of this essay, the fact that Wonder Man is good isn't proof that the MCU is back. But it is nice that in the midst of its dwindling into irrelevancy, it is still capable of giving us stories like this, that remind us of what it once was.
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