Determined actor Simon Williams fights for his dream job while dealing with his personal life, making new friends and enemies, and oh yeah, hiding his super-powers. 

What is it about shows, where the focus of the show is some well-thought-out storytelling, and not planet-eating monsters, zombie plagues, or world-ending consequences? Wonder Man at least starts off small, and intimate, encouraging we the audience to feel everything right along with Simon, and his newfound “friend”, the infamous Trevor Slattery. Little is as it seems however, so grab your hope in one hand and a healthy dose of paranoia in the other, and lets dive into this! 

So Simon Williams (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) is an actor who takes his job, his career, his profession, his art, just a smidge too seriously. It’s not as though he lacks for passion, or skill, but Simon’s enthusiasm for any role he manages to land, even one as a professor bound for a nasty slashing death on the set of a new American Horror Story season, gets him bounced from the job rather than lauded for his … intensity. But there is one person in the world of Hollywood who seems to share Simon’s love for the craft, a man who made himself entirely infamous due to one single acting job that at least temporarily fooled the entire world, once known as the Mandarin, the returned-from-perdition stage diva Trevor Slattery (Sir Ben Kingsley). 

Many kids have a special movie or TV show they loved watching with their parents when they were small, with the fandom from such a thing continuing into adulthood, and for Simon and his beloved now-gone daddy, it was the cheesy 70’s sci-fi epic called, you guessed it, Wonder Man. The scenes with Simon and papa in the theater, eyes shining as they drink in the film and share popcorn between them, surrounded by other fans in a darkened theater, is a recollection of those wonderful times many of us share and can’t forget, of the magic of the movie theater and its long, beloved traditions. So when Simon hears that the notably weird director Von Kovak (Zlatko Buric) is preparing to make as his next film a modern-day adaptation of Wonder Man, Simon insists it is a role he was born to play. 

Throughout all this mummery, as we follow Simon slogging from potential job to job, Trevor Slattery keeps showing up where Simon is too. And while this makes sense from a normal POV, Slattery is an actor (an “act-TOR”, as he often says) and would likely be at the same auditions Simon would be, we thought after the Mandarin nonsense and time served in jail, Slattery would be suitably cowed and fade into retired obscurity. However, actors need to eat, and make money, and for some, acting is a calling, right? Well, about that … 

Soon after the show establishes where we are and who our main characters are and what their motivations are, the show flips everything on its head and introduces Agent Cleary (Arian Moayed), of the Department of Damage Control. Agent Cleary has plenty of pressure being put on him by Deputy Secretary Heyerdahl (Dan Donohue), to clean up the issues the folks with super-powers have started dropping everywhere, hence the rather blunt name of the Agency, Department of Damage Control. And Agent Cleary’s pet project, the one that will definitely win him accolades and promotions and stuff if he can just keep the operation under his control, is sending in Trevor Slattery as a double agent to monitor and eventually bring IN Simon Williams. 

What Simon’s super-powers are, what they do and the fact that he can’t control them apparently at all, is far less important than the fact that Simon needs to hide them, at all costs. Simon early on mentions the legend of a person he calls Demarr “Doorman” Davis (Byron Bowers), and how the Doorman changed how Hollywood sees actors with super-powers forever. In episode four, appropriately titled “Doorman”, we are given the story of the Doorman and his rise to fame in the acting world after gaining portal super-powers when he somehow came into contact with the Darkforce. Done entirely in black and white, very reminiscent of Frank Miller’s Sin City jaunts which is great, the episode shows actor Josh Gadd as himself, enthusiastically doing movies with the Doorman after Demarr saves his life, until a tragic disappearing accident occurs. And suddenly, thanks to a kind, normal guy who gained super-powers and made some terrible mistakes with them, most of Hollywood now has a no-super-powered clause, or if they deign to hire someone like that, the insurance premiums go through the roof. 

So of course the casting process for a film like the newer Wonder Man is long, and involved, and for anyone who’s never made the disheartening trek through trying to get cast in anything in the acting world, much less a giant big-budget superhero remake film, just know the exhaustive rounds of competition are grueling and can easily break the spirits of lesser folk. Thus when Simon, with Trevor gamely in tow, goes to a birthday party for his beloved Haitian momma Martha (Shola Adewusi), and his older brother Eric (Demetrius Grosse) starts in about getting a real reliable job and contributing to momma and the families’ finances, long-simmering resentments between the two brothers unfortunately literally blows up momma’s newly-renovated kitchen island. (Side note, in Marvel lore, Eric Williams eventually becomes the character called Grim Reaper, so that’s super cool.) 

The cameos from surprise actors, especially Joe Pantoliano as a smarmy wealth-obsessed version of himself and X Mayo, who plays Janelle Jackson, a friend of Simon’s in the acting casting agency world, are all wonderful and wonderfully ironic too. Simon has enthusiasm for what he does in truckfuls of spades, but what he doesn’t have a whole lot of, is encouragement. And when Trevor begins what is effectively a bromance for the ages with Simon, as they bond over Shakespeare and film quotes and the miseries of trying to find a good place to record an intro for Simon, the audience watching them gets a real sense of the care, the good intentions mixing with the bad actions at the bottom of Slattery’s uneasily roiling stomach. He had to have known that at some point Simon would find out the truth, and so Trevor, one of the finest actors of his age, whose beloved sainted mother always believed in him, digs deep and does what he does best – to save Simon, he inhabits a world-shattering acting role, one last time. 

The show is absolutely smashing, especially the dear friendship that emerges between Simon and Trevor. People really seriously underestimate the value of encouragement, and when you’ve been a loner your whole life like Simon and suddenly find yourself with a friend who is so similar to you in so many ways, that kind of relief is a heady, powerful thing. That one person with whom, at the end of a long tiring day, you can share a drink and a laugh and a story, is more precious than any diamonds or pearls. Sadly, the show only boasts six episodes, but at least they were all put out simultaneously by Disney, rather than agonizingly drip-feeding us. And Simon’s redemptive actions at the end of the show open things up for all sorts of shenanigans in a season two of Wonder Man, which we should be clamoring for now! 

All six episodes of Wonder Man are for your wonderment, on Disney+ now! 

Reviewed by Alicia Glass