Marvel Finally Makes An Actual Television Show

_{She-Hulk: Attorney at Law (2022)}

_{Marvel Studios/TV-14/Ten Episodes}

_{Created by Jessica Gao}

_{Directed by Kat Coiro and Anu Valia}

_{Starring Tatiana Maslany, Ginger Gonzaga, Jameela Jamil, Josh Segarra, Jon Bass, Renée Elise Goldsberry, Tim Roth, Mark Ruffalo, Benedict Wong and Charlie Cox}

_{Cinematography by Florian Ballhaus and Doug Chamberlain}

_{Debuting August 18 and Disney+}

Debuting tomorrow on Disney+, She-Hulk: Attorney At Law is the first of Marvel’s Disney+ shows to feel like distinctly episodic television. While some (The Falcon and the Winter Soldier) felt more than others (Hawkeye) like ‘one long movie,’ this new offering is the kind of show that, in the pre-streaming days, would have run 22 episodes. It is loose, small-scale and not remotely concerned with a larger arc or end-of-world stakes. The cliffhanger that ends the fourth episode is almost comically inconsequential, and there’s barely a hint of a larger arc or overriding big-deal story. After essentially a two-part pilot where we meet our protagonist, learn how she became a Hulk and then see as she adjusts to her new life as an attorney for superheroes and supervillains, the show becomes, well, a television show.

There’s a joke in episode three where our heroine remarks on the B story and the A story colliding. What a joy it is even to have B stories. This shouldn’t be a novel concept, but it’s cause for celebration when Netflix’s The Lincoln Lawyer (developed initially at CBS) dares to offer ‘case of the week’ subplots alongside its season-long murder case. Likewise, while Tim Roth’s Abomination is heavily featured in the marketing, his story is (seemingly) wrapped up sooner than you’d expect. The fourth episode is arguably the highlight, an old-school episode of the week farce concerning the mystic arts being coopted by a C-rate stage magician. Yes, Benedict Wong shows up here and there, and the show openly admits (via fourth wall-breaking quips) that they are happy to use his earned fandom as a shield.

As befits a show about a lawyer interacting within the MCU, there are plenty of cameos and inside baseball riffs. The first episode is a glorified origin story, explaining how Bruce Banner (a game Mark Ruffalo) accidentally infected his cousin (Tatiana Maslany) with his Hulk powers and how she quickly adjusted to the trials and tribulations therein. Jessica Gao’s show relishes the opportunity to view the MCU through a lens of mundane annoyance; think my favorite Powerpuff Girls episode “Just Another Manic Mojo.’ As such, She-Hulk feels like the first one of these to feel like ‘ordinary people living in the MCU hellscape.’ I’m hopeful the whole case-of-the-week trend will continue beyond episode four since it will help the show avoid a common trap with serialized superhero storytelling, namely that the superheroes eventually only interact with each other.

Maslany has fun playing Jessica Walters and She-Hulk, and the show underlines the gender-specific inequities at play without using a yellow highlighter. The much-discussed CGI work is fine and dandy for an episodic television show. Despite yesterday’s clickbait Variety interview excerpt implying otherwise, the show has plenty of legal eagle-ing and plenty of She-Hulk being She-Hulk. 90% of all cases settle before going to trial. The vast majority of legal work involves everything except actual courtroom melodrama. Heck, civil cases going to trial are so rare that such circumstances are sometimes outsourced to attorneys specializing in trial lawyering. But I digress. That’s not to say that it’s a top-flight legal melodrama because this isn’t a David E. Kelly show, but it gets the job done regarding genre appropriation.

She-Hulk: Attorney at Law is a light, breezy, quirky, self-satirical romp. It wears its shamelessness in terms of genre appropriation and MCU ‘easter eggs’ as a comedic badge of honor. I love that it’s not devoting an entire season to one long case and that (thus far) the show is far more interested in She-Hulk as a lawyer than She-Hulk as a superhero. It’s also the first of these Disney+ shows to offer a human-sized look at life within the chaotic MCU, and it uses its specific setting to distinguish itself from other genre-specific offerings. It’s also unassuming enough to, like Doctor Strange 2, remind you of when Marvel was just another popular franchise and not a glorified monoculture whose every step was viewed through the lens of commercial success and political posturing.