You may wonder why it took Marvel so long to accept just how much it could do with so much less. Wonder Man is a series about intimacy, belonging, the importance of storytelling, and even a little bit about racial profiling. And all of that just happens to take place in a universe where superheroes exist—and a working actor like Simon Williams (Yahya-Abdul Mateen II) still has to balance creative integrity with paying the rent.
Simon looks like he’d be a shoo-in for just about any Hollywood project, but he turns out to be his own worst enemy, obsessing over minute details for bit roles to the point that casting directors decide he’s not worth the trouble. He’s a neurotic, insecure mess and, in the show’s first few episodes, isn’t an easy character to like. But after we meet his overbearing, traditional Haitian family, we start to understand why he feels so uncomfortable in his own skin. Despite Simon’s movie-star looks, his lack of success makes him a loser in their eyes.
Simon finally lands a job playing third-string hero Wonder Man in a new movie, which is ironic given that he also happens to possess superpowers of his own, and at a time in the MCU when superheroes are being persecuted. The series draws a straight line between Simon’s various code switches: He’s now a Hollywood star, but at home he diminishes into a much quieter, devoted son. In both cases, he’s forced to hide his power. Especially for nerds of color, Simon’s struggles feel achingly familiar, and as a treatise on being Black in Hollywood, Wonder Man doesn’t flinch when it comes to making success for Simon feel just as frightening as failure.
On the flipside, Trevor Slattery (Ben Kingsley) has gone from acclaimed actor to drug-addled failure for whom rock bottom was playing the role of international terrorist the Mandarin. In exchange for keeping him out of prison, Trevor is essentially a reluctant, McCarthian stool pigeon, attempting to identify and investigate suspected Enhanced Individuals, all so the government has an excuse to keep its very expensive prison for supervillains open.
Despite some intriguing subtext running through that subplot, Trevor’s dealings with the government aren’t nearly as compelling as the unlikely friendship he develops with Simon as two actors meeting on opposite career trajectories. Simon fears that his upbringing and Enhanced status will kill his dreams, while Trevor is haunted by his time as the Mandarin. Even playing a character as libertine as this, Kingsley is the show’s beating heart, helping Simon navigate the business and channel his neuroses into the characters he embodies.
There are, tonally, some minor consistency issues. A plot point involving a kid who accidentally captures Simon going super in public on a GoPro, for instance, veers into crime-comedy territory. The series also indulges in too much inside baseball, like a lot of stories about showbiz tend to do. None of that, however, outshines the fact that seeing Simon and Trevor achieve their dreams is the most exhilarating, superheroic feat the MCU has shown us in years.
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