iFanboy’s Conor Kilpatrick has seen the fabled Wonder Woman pilot and….
There wasn’t a whole lot about the pilot that I didn’t like.
Many of the worst elements of the script were eliminated and he liked the whole darn thing:
Overall, I quite liked it. When I was done watching the pilot I found myself bummed out that I wouldn’t be seeing any more episodes. I really liked this version of Wonder Woman. She is a badass fighter with a bit of an unhinged edge that gives her just a hint of “if she got out of control she’d be scary”.
Sadly, maybe it was all the bad buzz which helped torpedo this project and consign the greatest female superhero of all times to the scrap heap of misunderstanding yet again. Poor Diana.
Oh also, Adrianne Palicki wore lots of shorts and looked AWESOME. I predict we’ll be seeing lots of her again.
That’s what I’ve been getting at. . .a script does not necessarily reflect what the finished product will be. You never know what draft of the script is being shot, you don’t know how many producers’ or interested parties’ fingerprints are on it, you just never know.
I for one would love to see the pilot, and I’m sorry it didn’t get picked up.
But Conor Kilpatrick isn’t too bright. His writing is amateurish at best, and he loves Smallville. Says it all right there.
Smallville ran for 10 seasons. I’d take ten seasons of a Wonder Woman show, even if it weren’t exactly my cup of tea (as Smallville wasn’t).
I’d be more interested in what an average woman/man thought of it than a ‘geek’.
Adrianne Palicki is a very attractive woman. I hope she appears in more shows and/or movies.
As for the WW pilot…could be a million reasons why it wasn’t picked up. Maybe it cost too much, or maybe someone has a grudge with someone else. There’s too many possibilities to guess at.
“But Conor Kilpatrick isn’t too bright. His writing is amateurish at best, and he loves Smallville. Says it all right there.”
Yep, let’s instead play ‘gang up on the messenger for not saying what I wanted him to say’. Says it all right there for ya.
Considering all the dreck that has gone on to series on NBC, I’m still surprised this show got canned. How can it be worse than smallville, the event, or even the bionic woman?
The character is only cursed in the sense that she gets saddled with creators who don’t know how to write a character that is neither grim nor gritty. Rather they feel the need to ponder wonder woman’s role in the real world they should treat the character with a little charm and respect.
There is no reason there can’t be a WW movie that follows the Thor template. In fact they are similar fish out of water types.
Never thought I’d say this, but. . .
. . .eat shit, Tom Strong!
Kilpatrick’s review was interesting. A lot of junk and gimmicks were taken out before the pilot was shot, and references to her Amazonian background were deleted. What was left, however, was apparently fairly generic. If WW had a love interest, an unknown background (the most troublesome element to deal with, perhaps) and powers, what separates her from _____? Very little.
SRS
Her costume seems a little more conservative than Lynda Carters’.
If they gave the new costume a more bikini like bottom, I bet the suits would have green lit it.
Carters costume was far more conservative, attractive and, most of all, tailored! Her shorts looked like shorts. Palicki looks like she got a wedgie. Also, the stars on her panties are off balance. Either that or they forgot to glue them on. Total hookerville/low income cosplay.
And did she use a low flow shower head when she did her hair for that picture? It’s called styling mousse and it isn’t expensive.
It was a pilot. Most pilots don’t get picked up. Networks don’t consider pilots in a vacuum, but in terms of other pilots they’re considering, and the shows they already have on the air. A network might pass on a perfectly good pilot simply because they don’t think it fits the rest of their lineup, because making the pilot was difficult, because they foresee budget overruns, because they don’t think the concept has the legs to become a long-term hit, or for any of dozens of other reasons.
I think bad buzz for the show being picked up is a stretch. This is Conor’s review but there are two other people in the comments who saw the same pilot and had the opposite opinion. And somebody who would have been critical to the show’s buzz if it had been picked up, Michael Ausiello, trashed the pilot earlier this week.
Ultimately the only people whose opinion matters are those of NBC and the test audiences. One would assume that they too felt the show lacked, as Conor pointed out, the magic needed. A better question is will Warner Bros. learn from what didn’t work and give it another try. Or will Wonder Woman get the “one strike you’re out” treatment?
Agree with dcwomenkickingass ^. Of the many sins of network execs, being influenced by internet fan response is not one of them.
The odds are, the WW assignment was given to David Kelley simply to keep him in the NBC stable until they could renew Harry’s Law. I’m thinking, in the minds of NBC, Kelley was more important than a Wonder Woman franchise, especially since they don’t own it.
If the character’s corporate image and marketing potential weren’t concerns, I’d opt for a non-traditional treatment of WW. For example: Make her a lesbian and man-hater who fights crime on principle, but takes delight in punishing male criminals severely. She has adventures, finds a civilian lover, but finds U.S. culture unpalatable, especially the attitudes most American women have toward men. After an attempt to convince women to take over the country fails, she returns to her island with her lover and doesn’t venture out into Man’s world again.
Many readers wouldn’t want the character taken in such a direction, of course, but it’s less forced than plot-driven stories that consist of trying to come up with something for the heroine to do.
SRS
Synsidar, that sounds like an intriguing premise, but not a good Wonder Woman premise.
You should totally come up with a different name for the character, and write a script!
I could do that, actually. You might be interested in the demo piece I did with Phynesse years ago. I like the thought of writing about strong women.
My main concern is that while a publisher might want a comics character to go on forever, that doesn’t mean that a superhero can or should go on forever. In the case of WW, setting her up with Steve Trevor eliminates whole categories of stories before the writer has even begun thinking about writing one. Trevor is a signal that the writers will be following the “illusion of change” (IOC) policy, which practically guarantees that stories will be worse than they would be without the policy.
An experienced reader can easily tell whether the IOC policy is in effect for a given story. There’s no way to disguise it.
SRS
Well, the show seemed to get off on the wrong foot. Instead of making a straight up Wonder Woman show, they wanted to make David E Kelly’s Wonder Woman. Now maybe that would have worked with of course She Hulk (someone call Marvel Studios yesterday) or DC’s Power Girl. Yet I think this series was mismatched from the start.
Maybe now we can get a full on Wonder Woman film like all her fellow DC heroes are getting. Not that a TV show isn’t all well and good. Yet I’m kinda disgusted at how Warners turned their noses up at the idea.
Plus maybe now Adrianne Palicki can get a show or film that’s not stumbling out of the gate.
A lesbian man-hater? Hmmm, I dunno, I’m a straight man and I generally get along with lesbians pretty well. I haven’t noticed them as man-haters.
Personally, I’d hit the Paradise Island/mythology angle pretty hard with Diana. I’ll bet she’s a better success with the fantasy components in place as story fodder and motivation for her role in Man’s World than as a vehicle for star-spangled panties.
I also sort of like her as a brash, takes-no-shit kid, than as a mature, doe-eyed mate for Superman or Trevor… but that’s me. Her mythological model is her namesake, Artemis the Hunter, who had a temper and brooked no guff.
You know, they did a version that followed the Thor tack a couple of years ago. Unfortunately it was animated so it wasn’t taken as seriously, but it’s the best adaptation of WW yet.
Lesbians don’t hate men on principle, certainly, but the Amazons definitely did. Mythology described them as killing male infants or getting rid of them in other ways.
Love interests aren’t bad if the “other” complements the lead, because the combination creates more story possibilities than either character has alone. IMO, Trevor doesn’t complement WW in any respect. Get rid of him, junk the notion that WW has to have a male love interest that wonders about her secret identity, etc., and many more story possibilities open up.
Some writers might like such limitations as Trevor, but that might be only because he and other restrictions create built-in excuses for producing mediocre stories. Saying “I wrote the best story I could under the circumstances” is far different from telling someone “I wrote the best story I could.”
SRS
You make good points about the utility of a love interest for storytelling purposes.
I would point out that the Amazons took male lovers in order to have those unwanted male children, and the practice of exposing unwanted children was not uncommon in the ancient world.
Probably best left unmentioned in any WW story though :)
Well… there goes that cross-marketing synergy potential of seeing MAC ads during a WW show!
[Wait— did Palicki use MAC products at all?]
Agree that No WW tv series = more potential for a WW Movie. Why waste the remaining DC “Trinity” member on a weekly series when there’s that cinematic territory to claim? Hell, if DC okayed a Catwoman film, and MARVEL
an Elektra one: why not a Wonder Woman one??
Now struck with the thought of a live-action “Suicide Girls” series popping up on FX/SHO/STARZ after all this WW-on-tv brouhaha…
What sort of comicsratti firestorm would that raise? What would feminist “Nerdy Girls” think of the show? How will the DC/MARVEL “fanboys” demographic react to this
series pandering? Will the Alt/Indy “scenesters”
crowd embrace the non-Big Two offering?
Oh-oh.
I don’t see why that would cause any more of a stir than, say, the Girls Next Door TV show and the Pussycat Dolls have. The Wikipedia entry for “SuicideGirls” has a picture of women signing autographs at the 2007 SDCC. What the women do might not be to everyone’s taste, but it’s not illegal.
SRS
What a shame, as I have said I’d like to see the Wonder Woman TV series at least given a chance. Reading all the armchair quarterbacks direct and review a show they never saw was a bit odd. A pilot is just a launching point, not a perfect Emmy-winner right out the gate. But there’s a LOT of good TV that doesn’t have to be perfect and perfectly entertaining. Hopefully, the pilot will surface somewhere and I can give it a chance, too.
That’s true, but a pilot should be free of obvious weaknesses, or it will fare poorly compared to other pilots. Can you imagine a producer telling a network executive, “Oh, we’ll fix ____ once we begin production,” or a would-be novelist telling an editor, “Yes, that’s a serious plot problem, but I’ll rewrite three chapters after you buy the rights to it.”
The “overhauling” of the script indicated that the producers’ initial ideas weren’t good. Kilpatrick referred to “cringe-inducing” dialogue that didn’t bother him because he’d heard similarly lousy dialogue on other superhero shows. Rather than use her background and origin to launch the series dramatically, the producers avoided mentioning those elements.
Kilpatrick’s description provides multiple reasons to reject the series proposal.
SRS
@ Synsidar
“Lesbians don’t hate men on principle, certainly, but the Amazons definitely did. Mythology described them as killing male infants or getting rid of them in other ways.”
So, Wonder Woman was into alternative lifestyles by being attracted to men (Steve Trevor in particular).
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