The CW Is Developing A New Wonder Woman TV Show OR Let’s Stay Cool, Gang

Vulture is reporting that the CW has commissioned a pilot script for a new Wonder Woman show from former Wonder Woman writer Allan Heinberg.  Tentatively titled Amazon, the show would focus on the early years of Wonder Woman’s superhero career (because the CW doesn’t make shows about grown ups).  It’s like a Smallville for Wonder Woman, basically.

So first off, the good things.  Wonder Woman might be on a screen of some sort!!  That’s exciting, and Allan Heinberg is a good choice to do it.  His run on Young Avengers is a modern classic, really, and while his time on Wonder Woman was brief, I dug it.  He’s a guy with a solid comics background, and is a WAY better choice than David E. Kelley was.  Plus, hopefully they’re smart enough to learn from the MANY mistakes of the last failed Wonder Woman pilot.

However, let’s not get too ahead of ourselves here.  This is just a script.  There’s no greenlight or pilot guarantee or anything like that.  This is a rumour that the CW is, at best, looking into doing a Wonder Woman TV show.  That’s all we’ve got so far.

Also, we all know the history of bringing Wonder Woman to the screen… it just doesn’t work out well.  No one wanted to touch the David E. Kelley pilot, and with good reason, while for some reason Warner Bros. couldn’t get on the same page as Joss Whedon so he just went and made The Avengers instead.  Wonder Woman’s lived in development hell for ages, so we shouldn’t get too excited yet.

We should also remember that the CW already has a new superhero show scheduled for this fall in Arrow.  Smallville was solid for them, but you’ve got to think that the likelihood of Amazon getting made is going to depend on how well Arrow goes over.  If it bombs, the whole thing might get shelved.  And that’s a show that STARS Green Arrow, so it’s sort of a possibility.

Plus, it’s the CW.  That means a potentially low budget, melodramatic, terrible show.  No one wants to see One Tree Hill with Amazons.  Batman and Superman are getting $250 million movies, and I think Wonder Woman deserves to be in the same ballpark, not following America’s Next Top Model on a network not many people watch.  Though synergywise, Amazons are tall gals… you could do some cross-promotion with a guest spot prize for the model who takes the fiercest picture some week.

So yes, this is potentially exciting.  It could be cool.  Hell, it could be fantastic.  But it could also not happen OR we could get a show with Chad Michael Murray as Steve Trevor and last cycle’s Top Model runner-up as Wonder Woman.  A show on the CW might not be a great sign that Warner Bros. has faith in Wonder Woman as a potential franchise.

Let me leave you with some good news though.  In the 1960s, they tried to make a Wonder Woman pilot that turned out so awful they didn’t even bother to finish shooting it.  They tried again in the early 1970s with a TV movie that bombed.  Then, on the third try, we got Lynda Carter as Wonder Woman and a show that ran for three years.  Maybe the third time will be the charm again for Wonder Woman, and this show will take off after the Whedon and Kelley debacles.  But again, it’s the earliest of early days.  Let’s not get our hopes too high yet.

The Best Reaction To The Wonder Woman Pilot OR The Horror Is Still Spreading

One of my favourite artists in the whole internet is Noelle Stevenson, aka. Gingerhaze aka. the person behind How Are You I’m Fine Thanks.  She does all sorts of cool stuff, from the Broship of the Ring to her Nimona webcomic to roughly 8,592 drawings about X-Men: First Class.  And, unfortunately for her, she’s just watched David E. Kelley’s Wonder Woman pilot.

You may recall that I reviewed this a while back and loathed it with the burning hatred of a thousand suns.  It was not at all good, and even worse it was not at all Wonder Woman.  Now poor Noelle has seen it as well, all these months later, and she had feelings about it.  Here is her response:

THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT HAPPENED

not pictured: Wonder Woman’s big fight against a room full of comically beefy men in muscle tanks and codpieces, Wonder Woman pining over boyfriend, Wonder Woman flying tiny non-invisible jet to go from one side of the city to the other, Wonder Woman’s breasts constantly attempting to break free from their plastic prison, Wonder Woman being a terrible person, everyone telling Wonder Woman that she is great, because she has a cat she is good, writers completely missing the point, everything is terrible

Yeah, that’s about right.

Someone just ought to wipe the Wonder Woman pilot off the internet and spare everyone the torture of sitting through it.  It is, in every way possible, the worst.

So to sum up, a) even a year later the Wonder Woman pilot is still out there being awful and upsetting people, and b) Noelle is cool.

First Look At Erica Durance As Wonder Woman On Harry’s Law OR David E. Kelley Recycles

On an upcoming episode of Harry’s Law, airing on NBC on January 11, Erica Durance is guest starring as woman who thinks she is Wonder Woman because of some sort of pyschological snafu.  Durance played Lois Lane on Smallville, and Harry’s Law is run by David E. Kelley, the man behind the recent ill-fated and just all around awful Wonder Woman pilot.  TV Line has some pictures of Durance in her Wonder Woman garb:

So they basically re-used the Wonder Woman outfit from the pilot.  It looks to be the exact same costume.  Let’s split screen it with Adrianne Palicki:

Same weird tiara, same bizarrely large and obtrusive eagle across the chest, same super huge belt, and the same rather sensible star lined jeans.  It’s good to see that the Wonder Woman pilot wasn’t a total bust… Kelley’s recycled the outfit for his other really crappy TV show. 

Oh damn, I have a Wonder Woman blog.  I’m probably going to have to watch this episode… not cool!!  I thought I was done with David E. Kelley doing terrible Wonder Woman things!! 

Anyway, that’s Erica Durance as Wonder Woman.  There’s been a lot of live action Wonder Woman on TV lately, what with Penny on The Big Bang Theory, Heidi Marie Ferren on Bored to Death, and Wonder Woman showing up in the Spider-Man musical on Conan.  She’s a popular gal… you’d think she’d have a movie by now!!

Wonder Woman Pilot Review OR Now I Understand Why It Didn’t Get Picked Up

The Wonder Woman pilot is all over the internets if you know where to look for it (on any torrent site, really… not that I condone that sort of behaviour, of course), and I watched it last night.  It was kind of a mess.  Now, pilots are rarely very polished… there was some incomplete CGI, a lot of uneven sound, and what I have to assume was a filler score.  But apart from all of that, it was still a pretty bad show.

As a pilot, it was poorly constructed.  It wasn’t really an introduction to Wonder Woman, apart from a few clunky exposition scenes.  Her Amazon heritage wasn’t really explained, and we never saw Paradise Island/Themyscira or learned how she got to America.  On top of having little to no background on the character, Wonder Woman herself was really confusing.  She’s Wonder Woman, the superhero, and Diana Themyscira, the head of the company that funds her superheroic adventures.  The Diana Themyscira identity isn’t a secret… everyone knows she’s Wonder Woman.  BUT she’s also Diana Prince, a normal girl with an apartment and a cat named Sylvester, a third, secret identity so she can get away from it all.  All these identities seemed rather unnecessary.

Apart from the confusing main character, the storyline of the show was pretty weak and unexciting.  An evil pharmaceutical company, headed by Veronica Cale, is selling supplements that are killing its users.  Wonder Woman already knows who’s behind it (there’s no investigation action at all) so she calls out Veronica Cale publicly and beats the location of Cale’s secret lab out of a dude.  Then she swoops into the facility, takes down a bunch of goons, Cale gets arrested, and that’s it.  There’s some stuff about a possible Justice Department investigation of Wonder Woman, but that doesn’t turn into anything but an appearance by Steve Trevor.  It was hardly a compelling villain or a particularly interesting evil plot.

The execution was also lacking.  The story stumbled along, hampered by silly tangents and explanatory scenes that felt shoehorned in.  The dialogue was weak, and poorly delivered by most of the cast.  Nearly all of the characters were one-note… Cary Elwes was the exasperated CEO, Tracie Thoms was the calm and efficient Etta (I actually liked her), and Elizabeth Hurley was the blatantly evil villain.  I didn’t much care for Adrianne Palicki as Wonder Woman (and her other two identities… from now on, unless I specify one of the other two identities, let’s assume that by “Wonder Woman” I mean all three identities), but I think it’s less because of Palicki herself and more because the character was so severe.  And therein lies my biggest problem with the pilot:

I didn’t like Wonder Woman.  At all.  She was kind of a jerk and a terrible person.

If I had a nickel for every time Wonder Woman smiled in the pilot, I wouldn’t have enough change to use a payphone.  Wonder Woman was perpetually displeased with everything.  She was either angry or frustrated or annoyed or bothered or depressed or some combination therein.  She just wasn’t a pleasant character.  I LOVE Wonder Woman, but I very quickly lost my sympathy for the character.  Everything felt like a battle… she was super combative with everyone, even her allies. Plus, she was obviously engaging in criminal activity.

In the course of the pilot, Wonder Woman tortured a guy for information (instead of just using her lasso… wouldn’t that have been easier??!!), references were made to her using illegal wiretaps, and then she KILLED a guy by throwing a pipe through his throat.  First off, Wonder Woman doesn’t do stuff like that.  And second, that’s SUPER illegal.  Throughout the show, there were several supposedly villainous characters who were trying to investigate Wonder Woman and Themyscira Industries for various crimes, and I found myself on their side.  They were totally right… you can’t go around torturing and killing people!!  And Wonder Woman was completely blasé about it.  She expressed no regrets whatsoever for her torturing or killing.  That’s not how superheroes roll.

Apart from the murdering, Wonder Woman just wasn’t a happy person.  In a comicly bad scene about a buxom Wonder Woman doll, she expresses that the expectation of being perfect all the time weighs on her heavily.  Then, at home as Diana Prince, she is clearly depressed as she watches The Notebook and misses Steve Trevor.  The pilot ends with Diana watching a news program where the anchorwoman is saying that if she could be Wonder Woman just for a day then she’d be happy, but Diana just stares forlornly at the screen, sad and alone.  Apparently, being Wonder Woman isn’t as awesome as you might think.  It’s not a particularly heroic or inspiring note to end the program on… it was a real downer.

Of course, the source of all this angst and loneliness is Steve Trevor.  When he shows up later in the episode and Wonder Woman learns that he is now married, her disappointment is palpable.  Through flashbacks, we learn that she left Steve to become a superhero, but she still pines for him like crazy and spends her nights alone thinking about him.  In the scene where she gets upset at her CEO about the top-heavy doll, he basically says “So this is really about Steve, isn’t it?”.  And it is.  It was like 1950s Wonder Woman all over again.

So overall, it was definitely a structurally bad pilot, but the real problem was the unlikeability of Wonder Woman.  She is an angry, violent, mopey character, and not at all the Wonder Woman we’re used to from the comics and other shows.  Her methods are terrible, her character is poorly defined, and in the end you either are upset with or feel bad for her.  Or both (I was 80-20 for upset/feeling bad).  I really don’t think they could have salvaged this into a decent series without an epic overhaul.

Here are some quick, closing thoughts… first the bad:

• You named the black character Willis?  Really?
• Then you didn’t even say “What you talkin’ ‘bout, Willis?”!!!
• Also, no one says “ghettoes” anymore, David E. Kelley.
• Willis is one of the people affected by Cale’s evil pharmaceuticals, and Diana promises his mother vengeance.  Not justice… vengeance.
• I don’t get why Wonder Woman needs a corporation (that seems to get its money just from dolls) to fund her superheroing… are the Amazons not chipping in anything?
• The jet wasn’t invisible… come on!!
• Wonder Woman wouldn’t name her cat Sylvester.
• There were some amusing guest star talking heads… Nancy Grace and Jeffrey Toobin were pro-Wonder Woman, but Dr. Phil had some concerns.
• Does Jeffrey Toobin get a lot of these gigs? He seems like a random choice.
• The goons she beats up looked totally silly.  It was like they all just came from the gym or something.
• The fight with Elizabeth Hurley wasn’t even a fight.
• Parts of the costume worked, others didn’t.  The pants/shorts and boots were fine, and the bracelets looked decent.  The tiara looked pretty bad most of the time, and the top was just sort of ridiculous… there was a hilarious scene shortly after Wonder Woman rails against how the doll objectifies her where her top is BARELY holding her in.  It’s so bad.
• The show seemed a lot different than what I’d heard about the pilot script… a lot of scenes I expected weren’t there, and wasn’t it supposed to be two hours?
• OH MAN people need to stop using the “I can’t be with you because you’d be targeted by my enemies” excuse for not dating people.  It’s played out.

And now the good… there actually is some!!

• I liked how they used the lasso.  Most of the CGI wasn’t finished, but Wonder Woman was really swift and efficient with it and it looked kind of cool. 
• There was one scene where the lasso was just a yellow line… it was a really darkly lit scene, and reminded me of Sin City.
• She deflected bullets!!  And it looked pretty good.  She then impaled a dude with a pipe, but the bullet deflecting before that was fun.
• The fight scenes in general were decent, apart from the murdering. 
• Richard Gilmore!!!  Edward Herrmann played a senator who was fixing to investigate Wonder Woman.  I was jazzed not because of this senator character, but because The Gilmore Girls is an awesome show.
• I still like the show’s logo.
• There must be something else I liked…
• Nope.  That’s all I got.

NBC Says No To Wonder Woman

 

Entertainment Weekly is reporting that the Wonder Woman TV show is dead, and I think EVERY Wonder Woman fan in the universe saw this coming.  We’re used to hearing about potential Wonder Woman projects that don’t come together, leaving us toyed with and annoyed.  Though really, losing the David E. Kelley project is probably going to sting people a lot less than losing the Joss Whedon project.  Plus, we’re sort of numb to the pain now.

So NBC said no, which is a bummer.  For purely selfish reasons, I was jazzed to have a Wonder Woman TV show… that would be really handy for someone trying to shop a book about the character!!  As a HUGE Wonder Woman fan, the show sounded like it had some big problems (too big, it would seem now), but I appreciated that Kelley and his team seemed to be tweaking a lot of things in response to fan reactions.  They made the costume better, they had her kick more ass, and it just overall seemed like a show that was willing to evolve.  I anticipated not liking the pilot and then enjoying the show better as they played with it over the course of the season.  From what we originally heard of the pilot to what it became, it definitely sounded like it got better.  Not good, necessarily, but better.  It might have gone somewhere cool.

While I was never super enthused about the project (apart from the logo… I quite liked that), I was nonetheless looking forward to it.  When damn near every superhero/comic property has a movie or TV show on the way, Wonder Woman deserves to be on a screen of some sort.  She has SO much potential, and I think a decent Wonder Woman project could go over big.  I mean, look at Thor… it opened awesomely last weekend, and Thor is basically a male Wonder Woman.  Mythological background, cool powers, fish out of water… that’s Wonder Woman!!  It’s sad that no one can get anything going with Wonder Woman.

Now, NBC’s passed on Wonder Woman before… not to get your hopes up or anything.  They passed on the script before changing their mind, so maybe the same could happen here.  I hope they at least show it at some point, since it’s already made… maybe as a TV movie or something.  I’d even go for it leaking online.  I just want to see what it would have been like. 

NBC also passed on Ron Moore’s magic/cop show 17th Precinct, which is nuts… he made BATTLESTAR GALACTICA!! AND they passed on a Western set in Reconstruction-era America.  I would have watched the hell out of that show!!  It could be like Loveless on my TV (probably not… you’d need HBO for Loveless… I miss Loveless).  But they also passed on Don Johnson’s new show, so they’ve got some sense at least.  No one’s clamouring for a new Nash Bridges.  But yeah, this is a downer.  An expected downer, really, but a downer nonetheless.

Wonder Woman Pilot Gets “A Ton Of Rewrites”

io9 is reporting that David E. Kelley’s Wonder Woman script has undergone some serious tweaking, both before filming began and on the fly as the pilot shot.  This can only be a good thing, as pretty much everyone who reviewed the original script seemed to hate it (except the folks at NBC, I suppose).  Here’s a rundown of some of the new changes:

• Wonder Woman is going to kick a lot more ass.  At least two scene have been added solely to show Wonder Woman whooping some dudes, which is a good time.  Superhero shows/movies need whoopings (I’m looking at you, Superman Returns).
• The line “I’m Wonder Woman.  How do you think this ends?” is included in the new ass kicking scenes.  That’s kind of fun.
• We’re going to get more of a back story with Paradise Island and Steve Trevor, particularly in terms of his plane crash and Diana rescuing him.  It’ll be cool to see how they design Paradise Island.  I wonder if it’ll be as pastelly as the Lynda Carter version was?
• William Marston is in it!!  Or they’ve named a character after him at least.  Marston is her neighbour, and he and Wonder Woman go on a pretty bad date.  If he doesn’t suggest a little bondage play at some point during the date, I’ll be outraged.  William Marston the next door neighbour/bondage enthusiast could be a hilarious character.  He could call Diana and she could be all “I can’t talk… I’m a little tied up at the moment,” and he could exclaim “OH REALLY?!” and grin at the camera.  Maybe wink, or give a big thumbs up.  That’s gold… free for you, David E. Kelley.  But yeah, seriously… they’ve got to do some bondage jokes.

While I am still concerned about the show, along with everyone else in geekdom it seems, I do appreciate that Kelley is tweaking the show, and that all of these tweaks are making it look and sound better.  Time will tell if this is another Bionic Woman or The Cape situation, but hopefully they can make something cool of it.  Even if the pilot doesn’t turn out great, Kelley appears to be listening to the fan reaction and constantly adjusting, so if it gets picked up there’s a decent chance that it could get better as it goes along.  Anyway, I’m jazzed for William Marston.  Here’s another hilarious exchange that they could use on their date:

DIANA: I’m not looking for marriage or anything… I don’t want to be tied down.
MARSTON: Well I sure do!! (turns to camera, winks and smiles broadly)

More gold free for you, David E. Kelley.

Fan Reactions To Adaptations: A Game Of Thrones, The Hunger Games, And Wonder Woman

I recently read an interview with David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, the writer/producers of HBO’s upcoming A Game of Thrones series, in which they discuss fan reactions to their adaptation of George R.R. Martin’s epic A Song of Ice and Fire series.  They acknowledge that, even with all the time a series provides compared to a movie, various aspects of the books had to be cut or simplified, but they say this:

How do you handle the intense fan reactions online to every decision you make?
DB: I try to not get too much into it. You have to man up and do what you think is right for the series. No matter how good it turns out to be, someone’s going to complain about something. But by and large fans have been very supportive and enthusiastic.
DBW: When we do dip in and see what people are saying, it’s been gratifying. There tends to be a snarky negative quality usually to these things, but with this there has been an overwhelming amount of support.
DB: Because the books are so big and detailed and intelligent, the fans tend to be intelligent.

The producers are basically saying that the fans of the series understand the nature of adaptation, that things won’t be included and characters might look different and that there’s no such thing as a perfectly faithful adaptation.  I’ve found this to be the case with A Game of Thrones.  I’m a HUGE fan of the series, and have been following the news closely since the series was announced, and the fan reaction has seemed extremely supportive to me.  Even when fans disagree with certain decisions (the casting of Mark Addy as King Robert turned some heads, for example), the disagreement is often followed with a disclaimer that this disagreement is only the poster’s humble opinion, the decision may very well work out, and they are still super jazzed for the show. 

Benioff and Weiss attribute this generally positive response to the intelligence of their fans (which, as a fan, is rather flattering really), and I think they make an interesting point.  A Song of Ice and Fire is fantasy, but it’s grown up fantasy… it’s extremely long and involved.  You don’t have to be intelligent to read big, thousand-plus page books, but chances are that if you can keep the massive cast of characters (and their ever-changing machinations and motivations) straight, you’ve got a bit of brainpower.  And if you’re smart enough to follow everything in the book, those smarts might translate to a decent understanding of how adaptations work.

These comments made me think of the upcoming adaptation of another series I like, The Hunger Games trilogy by Suzanne Collins.  Gary Ross is set to direct the first film, with Jennifer Lawrence starring as Katniss Everdeen.  And everyone is just PISSED.  At EVERYTHING.  I’ve been following the news, and every announcement is met with epic derision and outrage in the comments sections.  I know comments sections are hardly a bastion of rationality, but the reactions have struck me as really over the top, as if every announcement was accompanied by Gary Ross driving to each fan’s home and punching them in the face. 

SIDENOTE: I’m not super enthusiastic about any of the casting either, but not in a threatening a revolution sort of way.

Now, the fans of The Hunger Games trilogy tend to skew younger.  They’re books for teens, though they’ve got a significant young adult following.  Lengthwise, the entire trilogy is shorter than a single book in Martin’s series.  Hell, they’re even shorter than the Twilight books.  I’m not at all suggesting that people who dig The Hunger Games are dumb… I really liked The Hunger Games!!  But as a group, I would think they’re certainly less mature than those who like A Song of Ice and Fire, and reading/keeping track of the trilogy would require much less brainpower.  So is there a correlation between intelligence and the fan response?

This brings me to Wonder Woman.  Comic book fans are well known for their unenthusiastic reactions to adaptations.  Frankly, outrage seems to be our default setting.  A while ago, when every adaptation totally sucked, this response may have been warranted, but the annoyed tone continues even with the recent rash of quality adaptations.  This is especially true with David E. Kelley’s Wonder Woman TV show, which has been generally decried from the get-go.  I used to think that, despite our penchant for outrage, our sceptical reaction was justified on account of the script sounds pretty bad and the costume initially looked cheap and shiny (it now looks slightly less cheap and shiny).  BUT maybe we’re just being unintelligent!!

Where do comic book fans fit in the Song of Ice and Fire/Hunger Games spectrum?  Well comics are short, so that’s more HG, but continuity is complicated and detailed, so that’s more SIF.  Comics have traditionally been kid’s fare, which puts us on the HG side, though we all know that adults buy far more comics than kids, which takes us back to SIF.  We’re easily annoyed, like HG fans, but we’ll all watch the show anyway, sort of like SIF fans.  I guess we’re some sort of bizarre amalgam that’s no so much in the middle of the spectrum as a combination of both extremes.  So we’re not intelligent or unintelligent… we’re just weird.  I can live with weird.