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Post by Jay on Sept 17, 2020 13:50:46 GMT -8
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Post by Jeremy on Sept 17, 2020 20:35:30 GMT -8
Apparently a lot of Community/GLOW fans upset by this news, as Allison Brie was rumored to be the prime casting choice.
I'm sure Maslany will be great. My only question is: How much will the show rely on fourth-wall humor? That's kind of She-Hulk's most defining attribute (apart from being a nine-foot green lady).
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Post by Jay on Sept 18, 2020 10:26:53 GMT -8
I was fine with Brie as a potential casting choice, but Maslany absolutely never occurred to me which is strange in that she absolutely has the chops to do it and even looks like she could be related to Mark Ruffalo. My concern, however, is that if something doesn't work out in the series, they'll try to pin it on her just because they don't know who she is (which was another surprise, you'd think there would be some crossover).
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Quiara
Grade School
Posts: 775
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Post by Quiara on Dec 11, 2021 11:48:55 GMT -8
Well, this is literally the only MCU-adjacent show I would ever consider watching other than, um, maybe WandaVision, so naturally there are absolutely no details about when the show will come out.
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Post by Jeremy on Dec 11, 2021 17:39:47 GMT -8
I'd expect the show will be out sometime in the first half of 2022, although Disney has a bunch of Marvel shows slated for next year and a few of them may get shuffled around.
Also, I just noticed that the showrunner for She-Hulk is Jessica Gao, writer of the Rick and Morty episode "Pickle Rick." So we can confirm she has some experience with wisecracking green action heroes.
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Post by Jeremy on May 17, 2022 17:31:06 GMT -8
We have a trailer! And a release date! The CGI looks fairly dreadful, but the humor seems to capture the spirit of the source material. Not sure how much fourth-wall-breaking there will be in the series; I assume any excessive format breaks will draw comparisons to Deadpool (even though She-Hulk preceded him and his audience-addressing repartee by several years). |
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Quiara
Grade School
Posts: 775
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Post by Quiara on May 22, 2022 8:45:01 GMT -8
We have a trailer! And a release date! The CGI looks fairly dreadful, but the humor seems to capture the spirit of the source material. Not sure how much fourth-wall-breaking there will be in the series; I assume any excessive format breaks will draw comparisons to Deadpool (even though She-Hulk preceded him and his audience-addressing repartee by several years). *Is* the CGI that bad? I dunno, it looks OK to me - I don't expect any of these shows to have really good CGI in the first place, but I *definitely* do not expect the Ally McBeal parody to have good CGI.
I didn't realize how much I miss Tatiana Maslany, is the other thing - even without the "I'm every woman" bit (which, bonus, means she gets to use her real voice instead of an Oi Bruv accent) she's extremely watchable and could probably carry a show like this solo.
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Post by Jeremy on May 22, 2022 14:24:24 GMT -8
*Is* the CGI that bad? I dunno, it looks OK to me - I don't expect any of these shows to have really good CGI in the first place, but I *definitely* do not expect the Ally McBeal parody to have good CGI. She's in the Valley - the Uncanny Valley! (Yes, I watched the new Rescue Rangers movie today. Apologies.) The CGI doesn't look appreciably worse than the levels shown on WandaVision or Moon Knight (Marvel understandably saves the bulk of its budget for the big-screen endeavors), but it's more distracting in the way they seem to have superimposed Tatiana Maslany's face onto an elongated and greenified version of her body. (The Hulk design from the Avengers movies - even the more humanized version from Endgame - is clearly more than just a buffed-up green Mark Ruffalo clone.) It just looks... weirdly off, and not sure it's off in the intentional comedic way. I'm also a bit surprised the trailer didn't lean more into the lawyerly side of Jessica's character. While a lot of the best She-Hulk comics predate Ally McBeal, her modern incarnation (particularly Dan Slott's run from the mid-2000s) draws some obvious inspiration from David E. Kelley's TV series, and the "Attorney-at-Law" subtitle suggests the show will continue that trend, tongue firmly lodged in cheek. But the trailer tries to have a little bit of everything (action! romance! cameos!), feeling a little unfocused as a result. |
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Post by Jeremy on Aug 19, 2022 14:02:39 GMT -8
I was hoping to get some thoughts on She-Hulk posted yesterday, but was overworked and did not watch the first episode till this morning. And unfortunately, that was enough time for the Internet's resident culture warriors to sink their hooks in the show and take over the whole conversation about it. Now any attempt at nuanced discussion of the show is overshadowed by the memes and the review-bombs* and arguments about wokeness and feminism and all the stuff that fan culture is made of.
Anyway, my feelings toward the first episode were pretty mixed, though most of the criticisms seem to be pilot-based in nature. Maslany is great fun (even if I jumped ship about halfway through Orphan Black), and she has good chemistry here with Mark Ruffalo. But this episode feels like an overlong preamble (with much of the origin lumped into flashback) then a full episode of the jolly green Ally McBeal riff the trailers promised. I wish Disney had posted the first two episodes together - as they've done with other shows like WandaVision - as apparently the next episode is more in-tune with the sitcom vibes that have defined She-Hulk as a character for the past forty years. I also wish the visual effects for the lead character were more convincing, even with the understanding that the a beefed-up TV budget is still below the price tag of an Avengers movie.
As for the gender politics - I'm used to this sort of thing by now, and I rolled my eyes at the comments praising the series for boldly treading new ground (Captain Marvel made a billion dollars, folks). Jennifer's rant about societal expectations of women and the personal need to keep their emotions in check makes sense in context of what we know about the Hulk, but it also feels a little forced into the story, as it doesn't tell us anything specific about a character that we don't yet fully know. Plus it only doubles down on the idea that she's just the female version of a male hero, a perception the show probably wants to move beyond.
So yeah, didn't love this, but I'll temper my expectations and see if the future episodes (which will apparently push much more into legal sitcom vibes) can pick things up.
*In fairness, IMDb posted a "yas kween" tweet about the show yesterday, so it's not like their hands are totally clean.
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Post by Jay on Aug 20, 2022 7:15:31 GMT -8
Well, if Taty ended up in a series where her acting was better than the writing, it wouldn't be the first time  I'll probably hold off until it's complete to give it a look, but I am woefully aware of the backlash and the anger management spiel Ms. Hulk had. |
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Post by ThirdMan on Aug 20, 2022 13:33:52 GMT -8
Saying it's like Ally McBeal isn't really a strong selling-point for me, as I thought that show gave way to an overabundance of increasingly annoying tics in all of its core characters early in its run. It became pretty unwatchable before too long.
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Post by Jeremy on Aug 20, 2022 18:19:18 GMT -8
I guess a better way of putting it is that the TV series will apparently draw inspiration from the 2004 She-Hulk comic series by Dan Slott, which was itself inspired by Ally McBeal. (Slott is most famous for writing more Spider-Man comics than any other human in existence, but She-Hulk was his first major superhero gig. In that series, she works for a law firm that employs both humans and superhumans, including some hilariously out-of-place reformed supervillains. It was pretty funny and extremely meta.)
Ally McBeal did indeed run out of gas pretty quickly due to its abundance of gimmicky characters and pre-YouTube Internet memes. I'm not sure what extent She-Hulk will lean into the fourth-wall humor - the first episode reserves that shtick for a couple of talk-to-the-camera asides - and I'm not sure how much it can distinguish itself as a comedy, given how the MCU as a whole has become so abundantly comedic. But the potential is there for a funny series, particularly with Maslany at the helm.
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Quiara
Grade School
Posts: 775
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Post by Quiara on Aug 22, 2022 16:30:09 GMT -8
I wish Disney had posted the first two episodes together - as they've done with other shows like WandaVision - as apparently the next episode is more in-tune with the sitcom vibes that have defined She-Hulk as a character for the past forty years. Oh, I think this is very deliberate on their part, because if they make it obvious that the status quo for the show is Single Female Lawyer, Fighting For Her Client, Wearing Spandex Supersuits and Being Self-Reliant rather than Avengers tie-ins, the target audience for the MCU TV series will just tune out. Or at least, I hope that's why they did it.
IMO this was pretty fun. My big complaint here is that they really didn't handle the meta elements very well - I think that the origin story bit of the episode is frustratingly straight. They could have elided it for laughs like in Spiderverse and it'd be funny. Or they could have played it super, super straight a la Strangelove and then had fun with that (and if that sounds pretentious I definitely think the deliberately useless A FEW MONTHS AGO intertitle is a Kubrick homage). They don't really want to play with the direct address in a way that'd rock the boat in this pilot. Which makes me think that episode 2 does go full hog with the fourth-wall breaks.
God, wouldn't it be fun if this show had previously-ons that took place within the world of the show!? I might just be saying this because I watched all of BrainDead which has the greatest previously-ons in the history of television (citation needed).
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Post by Jeremy on Aug 22, 2022 18:12:29 GMT -8
I think it's fair to say that BrainDead had the best "Previously On" segments ever. I'm surprised that more shows don't take advantage of TV's highly serialized nature to do fun and creative things in their weekly recaps. (Though Arrested Development went the other way with their terrific "On the Next..." segments.) Oh, I think this is very deliberate on their part, because if they make it obvious that the status quo for the show is Single Female Lawyer, Fighting For Her Client, Wearing Spandex Supersuits and Being Self-Reliant rather than Avengers tie-ins, the target audience for the MCU TV series will just tune out. Or at least, I hope that's why they did it. I mean, they did advertise that Charlie Cox would be reprising his role as Daredevil on this show (following his brief cameo in the latest Spider-Man film), so clearly MCU fanservice hasn't gone by the wayside. And I'm sure the inclusion of Mark Ruffalo in the first episode was to assure fans that this series is indeed part of the Avengers universe*. But most products that carry the Marvel banner are pretty much guaranteed hits by this point, no matter how tenuously they're connected to the center of the MCU. *The idea of Hulk crossovers to boost ratings reminds me of the Incredible Hulk animated series from the '90s, which was criticized by parents as being too dark and violent for a kids' show. The network made She-Hulk a costar of the series and lightened the tone into something more comedic. Fan response was not kind, and the series was cancelled midseason. Cartoons are a rough business. |
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Post by Jeremy on Aug 26, 2022 14:55:42 GMT -8
Episode 2!
A bit more in tune with the show that the trailers promised, though not without its share of clunky dialogue and dodgy CGI. (The show doesn't even seem to have enough budget to regularly show Jennifer's transformations onscreen.) The show's supporting cast is also not quite as memorable as a supposed ensemble sitcom would entail - two episodes in, and we haven't even been properly introduced to the people at Jen's new law firm. The comedy also feels fairly muted - again, a byproduct of the fact that the MCU has had an overtly comedic brand for years, and even a She-Hulk TV show is restrained by the limits of its carefully-curated universe.
Tim Roth does a good job in his return as Blonsky, though I must confess I haven't watched The Incredible Hulk in its entirety since the Dubya administration, and could barely remember how much of his recapping of that film's events to Jennifer was based in lies and distortion. These references did lead to the show's first good fourth-wall joke, where Bruce mentions that he's "literally" a completely different person since his fight with the Abomination. I was hoping Jen would have a line where she comments on how her cousin used to look like the faded alter-ego of Tyler Durden, but no such luck; that would probably be coloring too far outside the lines for Disney's taste.
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