Is Kevin Feige losing a handle on the quality of the MCU?
Genre: TV Show/Superhero
Premise: (from IMDB) Jennifer Walters navigates the complicated life of a single, 30-something attorney who also happens to be a green 6-foot-7-inch superpowered Hulk.
About: This series was created by Jessica Gao, which continues a recent Marvel trend of going with riskier and riskier showrunners. Up until this point, Gao’s biggest accomplishment was writing an episode of Rick and Morty. The show has had a strange press tour, with co-stars such as Jamella Jamil openly wondering, on social media, why her costume was so ugly. The show stars Orphan Black star Tatiana Maslany as the She-Hulk. The pilot was directed by Kat Coiro, who recently directed J. Lo in Marry Me.
Writer: Jessica Gao
Details: 35 minutes
Marvel is implementing the same genius strategy Lucasfilm implemented in the 90s whereby they took their IP and laid it directly on top of already proven video game genres.
Side-scroller? Add Star Wars characters. RPG? Add Star Wars characters. First-Person Shooter? Add Star Wars characters.
Marvel realizes they can utilize this same strategy with their television shows. They have an endless number of TV genres they can lay their brand on top of. Sitcoms? Wandavision. High-school comedy? Ms. Marvel. Legal One-Hour Drama? She-Hulk.
It’s a clever strategy and I hope that, as they tighten the screws and perfect the formula, it will work for them.
Unfortunately, She-Hulk is going to be seen as one of the early test-cases that didn’t work. The reason for that is simple. It prioritizes message over story. And the thing about message-pushing TV is, even if you agree with the message, you still feel the manipulation, which breaks the suspension of disbelief, and prevents you from enjoying the experience.
We’ll get to that in a second. But first, here’s a quick breakdown of Episode 1. A young attorney named Jennifer Walters tells us (as she talks straight to the camera) that she’s an attorney but she wants to catch you up on how she got here.
This jumps us into a flashback where Jennifer is hanging out with her cousin, Bruce Banner (as in The Hulk), when they get in a car crash. During this crash, Bruce’s blood leaks onto an open wound of Jennifer’s, which means Jennifer can now turn into a Hulk too!
So Bruce whisks her away to his own private island where he spends the rest of the episode training her in the ways of Hulkness. When he explains that she’ll need to train for 10+ years before rejoining society, she freaks out and says she only needs one week. Hey, it worked for Luke Skywalker. Why not her? (note: I came up with this analogy, not the writer. The writer isn’t nearly that clever).
Her reason for *why* she only needs a week may have been the single most miscalculated line in the history of television. Which I’ll get to in a bit. But, anyway, we jump back to the present, where Jennifer is finishing up a case in the courtroom when a female villain bursts into the room, cliffhanging us until the next episode.
So I went and watched some interviews about this show and what I learned was that they originally wrote the season so the origin stuff – Jennifer becoming She-Hulk – wasn’t revealed until the final two episodes. When they test-screened it, everybody was confused. You had this big green woman walking into courtrooms without any explanation as to why.
So they hurriedly rewrote the first episode as the “origin story,” where we learn how Jennifer turned into She-Hulk.
It’s for this reason that the first episode is so problematic. It feels rushed from the start. For example, Jennifer and Bruce are driving their car in the mountains and, out of nowhere, a spaceship arrives, which distracts Jennifer enough that she crashes. This spaceship is never mentioned again. We have no idea who it was or why it was there.
The writers then make one of the classic “I’m a newbie screenwriter” mistakes where Jennifer keeps passing out as a cheap way to move her from location to location. She passes out after the crash, which allows us to jump to Bruce’s lab. She passes out again during one of Bruce’s tests, which allows us to jump to Bruce’s secret island.
People don’t routinely black out. So, when you’re doing that, the reader reels from your laziness. It feels like the writer isn’t even trying.
From there, we get the “fun and games” section where the Hulks play around with each other, tossing boulders into the atmosphere. It gets kind of fun, except that there’s this growing “men just don’t understand” subtext permeating the story. If Bruce is explaining something about being a Hulk, Jennifer sees it as “mansplaining.”
It’s mostly in a jokey way. But that’s when the show hits us with the line that’s now gone viral and which will be the nail in She-Hulk’s coffin. Because what the line says is, “This is a message show. We’re going to be propping up one gender over another. And if you don’t like that, buh-bye.” Which is their prerogative but it’s a fast way to lose half your audience. And why in the world would you want to do that?
*Ahem* 🗣 Say it louder for the people in the back 🗣 #SheHulk #TatianaMaslany pic.twitter.com/EWd57xbehr
— IMDb (@IMDb) August 18, 2022
Being this on-the-nose about ANYTHING isn’t going to work. There’s also such a generalization here from the character – painting gender with such a broad brush – that it makes her look ignorant. Which, in turn, makes us not like her.
One of my favorite movies from a couple of years ago was The Invisible Man. That movie was about the dangers of some men being toxic. And it never had a scene like this. Where the heroine spouts out on-the-nose dialogue about the state of the male gender. If ever there was an attacking line, it attacked the individual, her ex-husband. Not every person on the planet with a penis. Yet the movie gets its message across 1000x better than She-Hulk.
It’s frustrating because I like the actress here. And I like the idea of a superhero version of Ally McBeal (which is getting a sequel btw, BECAUSE of this show). But the second the show decided it wanted to be exclusive instead of inclusive, it was done. They may double-down with a series renewel out of spite for the blowback they’re getting. But mark my words, this series is toast.
Kevin Feige has to be careful because he’s starting to lose touch.
We just saw Top Gun pass Avengers Infinity War at the domestic box office. What is Top Gun known for other than being a really great movie?
ZERO MESSAGE!
All it cared about was entertaining. And audiences were like, “FINALLY! We don’t have to be preached to. For once!”
“Nope,” the biggest major release message film of the year, made 100 million less than the studio was hoping for.
They/Them is getting destroyed by the very critics who are so desperate to prop it up.
People are sick of the preaching. Yet She-Hulk is ready and willing to not only die on that hill, but become a martyr on it.
The thing is, there are ways to push messages and get the audience on your side. One way is to take the piss out of the preaching. When Jennifer says, “Men are toxic and the patriarchy is in charge and blah blah blah,” have Bruce say something like, “Okay, calm down there, Don Lemon.” Have more fun with it instead of slamming us over the head with a hammer, implying that if we don’t weep for Jennifer, we’re bad.
Unfortunately, even if this wasn’t an issue with She-Hulk, the writing isn’t strong enough to have saved it. We can see that right from the start. Jennifer turns to the camera and starts explaining things to the audience. This is fine. Breaking the 4th Wall has been done forever and is a legitimate creative option.
But then she refers to what she’s in as a “legal show.” In others, she goes beyond the fourth wall to the fifth wall. She’s not just talking directly to the audience. She’s telling you that this thing she’s a part of? She’s just an actor in it. They might as well have turned the camera to show the crew shooting the shot. That’s how little they care about creating an illusion.
It’s sloppy. It’s a cop-out. It gives them an excuse to be lazy cause now their hero can say stuff like, “Sorry for that lame scene! We didn’t have a lot of time to write it! Zoinks!”
Between that and the random spaceship and the blackouts and the over-the-top messaging – this is just a poorly written show. The only reason it seems halfway professional is because of all the money they spent on it. But from a writing perspective, it’s hackneyed and should be used as an argument to reestablish some quality control at the Marvel headquarters.
[x] What the hell did I just watch?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the stream
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: What a lot of writers don’t realize is that when you preach, you literally achieve the OPPOSITE of what you were trying to do. We see you’re trying to insert a message into our head, which makes us resist the message. Instead, sell your message through SHOWING as opposed to telling. By showing us just how psychotic and obsessed the ex-husband was in The Invisible Man, we received the deeper message about male toxicity invisibly.
