Jan 10, 2022 07:03 PM
I missed this when it came out months ago. NBC understandably rejected the show. Dunno if trying the scheme with a guy superhero first would have helped much. Since there are few stand-out female superheros, and thereby WW is regarded as too sacred to be tinkering with in this demented kind of way.
OTOH, when the United Nations selected WW as "honorary ambassador for female empowerment" back in 2016, there was an outcry from cancel culture that WW was too white and historically sexualized to serve as a role model. So the UN retracted that decision.
But not long before then there were was concern about why DC was taking so long to get its first Wonder Woman movie into production. Accusations flying around that it was due to a sexist industry that didn't consider female superheroes to be as important.
So go figure -- no matter where the Amazon from Themyscira seemed to step there was a land mine. Either a feminist icon that can't be sullied -- or a racist, exploitive, misogynistic symbol that "you can toss in the mud wrestling pit for all we care".
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https://gizmodo.com/david-e-kelleys-wond...ol-5824976
EXCERPT: We've seen the unaired Wonder Woman pilot, and it's actually kind of worse than we expected. It's bad in the ways that we were all expecting, but it's also bad in other, more fundamental, ways.
[...] a lot of "working woman juggling career and personal life" trauma — because it's David E. Kelley, and he's built in the concept that Wonder Woman has two secret identities. So she has her "corporate bosslady" identity, dealing with meetings, and then her "lonely single woman" identity, whose biggest problem is creating a Facebook profile for herself.
But the thing you don't expect from this pilot is how tone-deaf it is about superheroes, and how smug and brutal Wonder Woman is. You get the impression, watching this thing, that nobody has ever really read a good superhero comic, or gotten the slightest idea why superheroes work. There's a lot of discussion of whether Wonder Woman is an unlawful vigilante — which she clearly is, without a doubt — and we constantly see her torturing, murdering and trampling people, without any concern for the law.
[...] Not that the Wonder Woman pilot isn't screamingly funny in parts — it definitely is...
[...] African American women follow Wonder Woman around, worrying about her feelings and begging for her help in avenging their poor victimized sons. And everybody worries about Wonder Woman's mental state and whether she's lonesome and whether she needs a man, all the time — even when she's facing criminal charges for beating up tons of people without any justification.
[...] her "corporate bosslady" identity, with a huge office overlooking a giant hive of worker bees, all of them apparently toiling away to merchandise her image for profit...
It's really very jarring. David E. Kelley boils down superheroes to a shriveled core of violence, arrogance and meanness, like the worst of early 1990s Image Comics heroes. And then to humanize his main character again, he adds a stock set of "lonely career woman" tropes that are lifted directly from all his lawyer shows... (MORE - missing details)
OTOH, when the United Nations selected WW as "honorary ambassador for female empowerment" back in 2016, there was an outcry from cancel culture that WW was too white and historically sexualized to serve as a role model. So the UN retracted that decision.
But not long before then there were was concern about why DC was taking so long to get its first Wonder Woman movie into production. Accusations flying around that it was due to a sexist industry that didn't consider female superheroes to be as important.
So go figure -- no matter where the Amazon from Themyscira seemed to step there was a land mine. Either a feminist icon that can't be sullied -- or a racist, exploitive, misogynistic symbol that "you can toss in the mud wrestling pit for all we care".
- - - - - - -
https://gizmodo.com/david-e-kelleys-wond...ol-5824976
EXCERPT: We've seen the unaired Wonder Woman pilot, and it's actually kind of worse than we expected. It's bad in the ways that we were all expecting, but it's also bad in other, more fundamental, ways.
[...] a lot of "working woman juggling career and personal life" trauma — because it's David E. Kelley, and he's built in the concept that Wonder Woman has two secret identities. So she has her "corporate bosslady" identity, dealing with meetings, and then her "lonely single woman" identity, whose biggest problem is creating a Facebook profile for herself.
But the thing you don't expect from this pilot is how tone-deaf it is about superheroes, and how smug and brutal Wonder Woman is. You get the impression, watching this thing, that nobody has ever really read a good superhero comic, or gotten the slightest idea why superheroes work. There's a lot of discussion of whether Wonder Woman is an unlawful vigilante — which she clearly is, without a doubt — and we constantly see her torturing, murdering and trampling people, without any concern for the law.
[...] Not that the Wonder Woman pilot isn't screamingly funny in parts — it definitely is...
[...] African American women follow Wonder Woman around, worrying about her feelings and begging for her help in avenging their poor victimized sons. And everybody worries about Wonder Woman's mental state and whether she's lonesome and whether she needs a man, all the time — even when she's facing criminal charges for beating up tons of people without any justification.
[...] her "corporate bosslady" identity, with a huge office overlooking a giant hive of worker bees, all of them apparently toiling away to merchandise her image for profit...
It's really very jarring. David E. Kelley boils down superheroes to a shriveled core of violence, arrogance and meanness, like the worst of early 1990s Image Comics heroes. And then to humanize his main character again, he adds a stock set of "lonely career woman" tropes that are lifted directly from all his lawyer shows... (MORE - missing details)