About:
- Genres:
- Action-Adventure
- Comedy
- Science Fiction
Fix: Marvel, Superhero Action/Adventure, Courtroom Drama, Feminism, Meta
Platform: Disney+
Disney Plus Summary:
In Marvel Studios’ She-Hulk: Attorney at Law, Jennifer Walters – an attorney specializing in superhuman-oriented legal cases – must navigate the complicated life of a single 30-something who also happens to be a green 6-foot 7-inch superpowered hulk.
FYA Summary:
It’s a familiar story: something traumatic happens to an ordinary person – for Jen, it’s surviving a car crash with her cousin Bruce and ending up with green Hulk blood running through her veins – they get superpowers, become a hero and save the world … except not quite. Jen is determined to stay herself, practice law and hopefully someday find a boyfriend. But how can she do that when almost everyone around her only sees her as She-Hulk?
Familiar Faces:
Mark Ruffalo as Bruce Banner/The Hulk and Tatiana Maslany as Jennifer Walters/She-Hulk
“Anger and fear?” she wisecracks when Bruce lectures her about what causes the Hulk transformation. “For a woman, that’s baseline existence.” This sums up her character in a nutshell. She can throw people around like rag dolls, but her sharpest weapons are her words, which get her into trouble as much as out of it. Maslany does a great job of showing the character’s emotional vulnerability as well as her strengths.
Jen’s wise, world-weary, occasionally overbearing cousin. After everything Bruce went through during the Avengers movies, it’s nice to know he hasn’t lost his sense of fun, and can roughhouse with She-Hulk like giant green toddlers. It’s also nice to see him learn to respect her, even when social media casts her as an impostor who stole his powers.
Benedict Wong as Wong
Supreme Sorcerer Wong, first seen in Doctor Strange, protects a hard-drinking party girl named Madisynn from dangerous magic, and she follows him home. This solemn, mystical character sharing cocktail recipes (“Vodka with yak milk. Never again.”) and answering to the nickname “Wongers” deserves his own spinoff, or at least some fan fiction.
Couch-Sharing Capability: TV Watches You
Like WandaVision, this is a very self-aware series. People who love Marvel superhero stories will recognize familiar tropes and characters, and people who dislike them will enjoy how the writers make fun of them, notably Jen’s habit of speaking directly to the camera. “I’m a Hulk. We smash things,” is how she explains it. “Bruce smashes buildings, I smash fourth walls.”
Recommended Drink: Green Slushie
I’m talking about those brightly colored, intensely sugary things you can buy at a gas station that will make you bounce off the walls (or smash them). It’s not very subtle, but it sure is fun.
Use of Your Streaming Subscription: Promising
I admit I was disappointed by the villains. She-Hulk can throw cars, cause an earthquake with one fist, and ruin an opponent in the courtroom … and her enemies are a pathetic pack of Internet trolls who don’t even have superpowers? Like I said earlier, though, this show is self-aware. It knows what it’s doing. Pathetic or not, those trolls are still a threat. A Hulk can’t smash them and a lawyer can’t sue them if she doesn’t know who or where they are. Besides, it’s how she responds to them – and how the public responds to her – that matters.
The way other characters treat Bruce and Jen in their Hulk forms says a lot about how society responds to male and female anger. In the Avengers series, the Hulk is feared, but also respected; Bruce’s colleagues are careful not to provoke “The Other Guy” unless they need him, and a pretty woman is on hand to soothe him until he shrinks down. She-Hulk, on the other hand, gets mocked, fetishized, or threatened when she transforms, and ignored when she doesn’t. It’s enough to make me want to smash something too, although not being a Hulk, all I really did was glare at the screen.
This series is exactly what it looks like: the story of an angry woman learning to wield her anger intelligently, not to break rules, but to change them. None of us need superpowers for that.
We published this review during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. This work would not exist without the labor of writers and actors, and we support their goals.
It makes me want to Hulk out when I see what low rating this show has. It’s SO good. And the fourth-wall breaking and making fun of the rest of the Marvel ‘verse is so, so perfect. (And this is coming from a huge MCU stan.)
I know what you mean. She really gave KEVIN a piece of her mind about its screenwriting. 😀
I laughed SO hard at that. What a truly hilarious piece of self-commentary.