There’s a moment early in Wonder Man that feels like a quiet manifesto for the entire Marvel experiment.

“Our ideas about heroes and gods, they only get in the way,” declares eccentric Eastern European filmmaker Von Kovak (Zlatko Burić), addressing a room full of anxious actors auditioning in his lavish Los Angeles home. “They’re too difficult to comprehend. So let’s get past them. Let’s find the human underneath.”

If this were spoken in any other Marvel series, it would sound like pretentious window dressing. In Wonder Man, it sounds like rebellion.

Because for over a decade now, the Marvel Cinematic Universe has been obsessed with gods, legends, and cosmic destiny. What it has often forgotten is people. Wonder Man—streaming its first season in full on Disney+—is the rare Marvel project that seems to understand this problem and actually tries to fix it.

This is not another story about collapsing cities or portals tearing open the sky. It’s set in a mostly recognizable Los Angeles where the entertainment industry still exists, agents still lie, auditions still crush souls, and self-tapes are still recorded in miserable strip-mall studios with nautical themes. The superpowers are present, yes—but they’re background noise to the real drama: ego, insecurity, failure, and friendship.

In other words, Wonder Man is the least Marvel-feeling Marvel show in years—and that’s its greatest strength.

A Superhero Story Built Like an Indie Film

The series is built around a deceptively simple pairing. Yahya Abdul-Mateen II plays Simon Williams, a struggling actor who desperately wants to be taken seriously. He’s the kind of cinephile who writes elaborate backstories for his one-line roles and expects the entire crew to care. That same obsessive self-regard has just driven his girlfriend out of their shared apartment and gotten him fired from American Horror Story for overthinking a minor part.

Simon is not heroic. He is exhausting. And he is painfully recognizable.

Enter Trevor Slattery.

Yes—that Trevor Slattery. Ben Kingsley returns as the washed-up actor who once pretended to be the Mandarin in Iron Man 3, fronting terrorist propaganda videos in exchange for drugs he was too high to realize came from actual criminals. In Wonder Man, Trevor is sober, paranoid, and still carrying the weight of internet conspiracy culture. When Simon introduces himself, Trevor snaps:

“Whatever you’ve seen on Reddit is false. I had nothing to do with Pizzagate. I’m not Illuminati. And I did not have my hands replaced with baby hands.”

Simon’s response—“I always dug your Mandarin performance”—tells you everything about this show’s priorities. These two men bond not over trauma or destiny, but over acting. Over Pinter. Over soap operas. Over shared humiliation.

Their meet-cute in a movie theater is no coincidence (law enforcement still has opinions about Trevor’s past), but the show wisely doesn’t bury viewers in continuity homework. Creators Deston Daniel Cretton (Shang-Chi) and Andrew Guest (Community) quickly sketch the necessary backstory and move on to the relationship. In a franchise infamous for lore overload, this restraint feels almost radical.

Hollywood Satire That Actually Knows Hollywood

Unlike so many Marvel attempts at “real-world” storytelling, Wonder Man genuinely understands its setting. It doesn’t treat Hollywood as a punchline; it treats it as a dysfunctional ecosystem full of strange rituals and emotional landmines.

Simon records self-tapes at a rickety shop called Ahoy Tapes. A rival actor got famous as “Paul Thomas Anderson’s surfing instructor.” A nightclub doorman becomes a celebrity after touching a mysterious substance that literally turns his body into a door. Josh Gad appears as himself in an episode that feels ripped straight from Community’s meta-comedy playbook.

And presiding over all of this madness is Von Kovak, the European auteur directing the Wonder Man reboot—a melancholy Herzogian figure whose mansion feels like a museum of Hollywood Regency excess. He’s absurd, but also oddly sincere, embodying the collision between artistic ambition and corporate machinery.

Cretton and Guest don’t just mock Hollywood. They romanticize it too—just enough to make the satire sting.

What Makes It Work (and What Still Doesn’t)

What ultimately elevates Wonder Man above Marvel’s recent Disney+ output is care. Real, old-fashioned narrative care. Simon and Trevor feel like people, not content delivery systems for the next crossover. Their friendship develops through shared misadventures that grow naturally from who they are: insecure, self-sabotaging men desperate to be seen.

Yahya Abdul-Mateen II gives Simon a volatile mix of narcissism and vulnerability, while Ben Kingsley leans fully into Trevor’s tragicomic paranoia. They make each other better. This is a two-hander disguised as a superhero show—and that’s why it works.

It isn’t perfect. The women in the series are frustratingly underwritten. Olivia Thirlby’s girlfriend character barely exists beyond a few scenes across eight episodes. The show still can’t resist Marvel’s favorite metaphor: superpowers as a stand-in for “what makes you special,” a coming-of-age cliché this genre should have outgrown by now.

But these flaws are easier to forgive because the season finale doesn’t default to lasers in the sky. It resolves emotional arcs instead of just visual effects. That alone puts Wonder Man in rare company.

Marvel, Finally Acting Like TV

Marvel has flirted with this level of character-driven storytelling before—Netflix’s Jessica Jones, FX’s Legion—but Wonder Man is the first Disney+ Marvel series to truly earn comparison. It doesn’t feel like a stretched-out movie trailer. It feels like television.

In a landscape already crowded with meta-superhero commentary (Watchmen, The Boys, The Franchise), Wonder Man should feel redundant. Instead, it feels oddly fresh—because it remembers that superheroes are only interesting when the humans inside them are.

Von Kovak was right. Heroes and gods get in the way.

Wonder Man finally pushes past them—and finds something better underneath.

In an era where superhero stories are trapped between spectacle and sameness, Wonder Man quietly reminds us why this genre mattered in the first place. Not because of gods in the sky or universes colliding, but because of flawed people chasing meaning in impossible worlds. It is Marvel at its most introspective, its most humane, and—perhaps for the first time in years—its most genuinely interesting.

If this is the future of superhero storytelling, then it’s one worth rooting for.

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