First Review & New Stills Revealed For NBC's Cancelled-Wonder Woman Pilot!

As Wonder Woman/Diana Themyscira/Diana Prince, Adrianne Palicki was a revelation. I was already a big fan of hers from Friday Night Lights but here she takes center stage and pulls off what is an extremely difficult role. She’s tough, she’s charming, she’s sexy, she’s vulnerable, and she’s got a little bit of an angry edge to her when she’s Wonder Woman that adds just a dash of exciting unpredictability. This could have been a star making turn for Padlicki who certainly deserves one.

The Wonder Woman on this show is a badass who is not above choking dudes with her lasso (her favorite move) or throwing a piece of pipe through your throat if you won’t stop shooting at her. For a weekly television show, the action scenes were fairly well executed and at times quite thrilling. The whole final sequence where she storms Veronica Cale’s compound and decimates her ‘roided out super-soldier army is really fun to watch.

The first time we see Wonder Woman she is wearing the version of the costume that we’ve seen with the blue pants. The biggest surprise in the entire pilot? When she shows up to take on Veronica Cale’s goons for the final big action scene, she’s in the classic pants-less comic book costume. That costume only appeared briefly in the script where it hung in the back of her closet. There is a mention of a designer coming in to discuss a new costume so it would appear that this Wonder Woman has different costumes for different occasions. Whichever costume she's wearing they all really work on-screen.

A lot of time was spent in the script on Steve Trevor and the effect that their break-up had on Diana. That’s toned way, way down in the pilot. In fact, the famous sequence where she has a sleepover with her best friend and eats ice cream and talks about their breakup and then cries because she misses Steve is nowhere to be found. Yes, there are a few flashbacks to their break-up, and yes, Diana misses Steve, and yes, it has affected her, but how she deals with it is handled in a much more realistic way. Diana is obviously lonely and does not have any kind of personal life and that was clearly being set up as a subplot to run through the series.

The streamlining of the script really worked in the pilot’s favor. The story moved much quicker than it read. For example, in the script, Diana spent a long sequence testifying before the United States Congress about her vigilante activities, which allowed for long and droning speechifying on both sides. That would have been really boring on screen. In the pilot, that sequence is swapped out for a scene in which she has dinner with one sleazy congressman. The same information about the government being uneasy with Wonder Woman’s activities was conveyed in a much quicker, and more compelling, way.

There wasn’t a whole lot about the pilot that I didn’t like. The most glaring was probably Cary Elwes, as CEO of Themyscira Industries Henry Demeter, who had “superhero overacting disease” in which perfectly respectable and talented actors think that because they are in a comic book production that they need to turn the goofiness up a few notches. As Steve Trevor, Justin Bruening was a bit of a mannequin. A very handsome mannequin, sure, but he didn't exactly exude a ton of charm. The device of filing in exposition with a lots of talking head

cameos from real life television personalities was a little grating after a while, though one would hope that there would be less of a need to hear that... sigh... Dr. Phil thinks that Wonder Woman is a wacko as the show progressed. There were also a bunch of cringe-inducing lines of dialogue which I was apparently mostly comfortable with after years of watching Smallville and Heroes.

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". She's also vulnerable and relatable as a person which is crucial for a television series lead. Was she exactly the Wonder Woman from the comics? No. Of course not. But she's also not so far off as to be foreign. Ultimately, had this series been picked up I think we would have had an interesting new version of Wonder Woman, and a series that would have been a lot of fun. Were there parts that were clunky? Yes, absolutely. Especially some of the dialogue from the talking heads. Did Carey Elwes need to tone it down a notch? Yes. But this was a pilot and these things would have been fixable. Series often go through a lot of

changes and adjustment after the pilot and there's no reason why Wonder Woman wouldn't have been any different. Overall, it's not a total surprise that NBC passed on the show. While the pilot is really solid and lots of fun, it wouldn't blow anyone away and when you're talking about a show that would be as expensive to produce as this one, the first time out of the gate it has to be spectacular. To steal a line from a friend who also saw the pilot "I'd still like to see more but it's missing something. It sounds corny to say, but I think it needs a little magic, a little WONDER."