To honor the legal spirit of presumption of innocence, I have decided to not write a review of She-Hulk Attorney at Law until I had seen the whole thing.
So, if you still haven’t watched or finished it, spoilers ahead!
She-Hulk Attorney at Law was touted as a ‘MCU Ally McBeal’ show. To be honest with you, it got big shoes to fill. Also, She-Hulk on the pages is famous for breaking the fourth wall, so how would the show handle this very unique aspect of the character was something I was extremely interested in.
The show did not shy away from the fourth wall right off the bat. Tatiana Maslany, who plays Jennifer Walters, the titular character of the show immediately addressed the elephant in the room. Making the whole ‘origin story’ relevant yet irrelevant. As she said, she just wanted to get this out of the way, so the audience could enjoy this little legal show.
Moving onward in the following weeks, I really enjoyed this ‘MCU Ally McBeal’ show as it felt like a breath of fresh air within the MCU. Not everything needed to be that serious. Yes, we are tying into the overall narrative, but we could have a bit of fun too. For me using different format and genre is what made MCU productions a bit more interesting than just having every entry life threateningly serious.
However, with that in mind, after a few weeks I started to feel that the show is losing its identity and focus. Yes, I know this is not a show about ‘weekly cameos’, and it is not about her cousin Bruce Banner, who got exiled by the story to somewhere else. However, the underlying serious tones with the Intelligencia, which turned out to be a group of self-pitying men, was overplayed to a point that I felt like it was an unnecessary distraction from the ‘little legal show’ that I was looking for. I enjoyed all the legal procedures in different cases, the bantering among colleagues competing for attention, and all the quirky clients along the way. As such, the underlying sinister tones that resulted in a pretty much an inconsequential manner really took me away from the little world of Jennifer Walters, which I tried to enjoy every week. For me it was a distraction because it made a show too much like a Marvel show. Maybe I was spoiled, maybe I was demanding, but I wanted to be able to watch a Marvel show that doesn’t feel like overwhelmingly Marvel.
I loved WandaVision because of its interesting premise and its pretty much standalone story that happened to tie into the Marvel world. I was hoping She-Hulk Attorney at Law was the same.
Then the finale happened.
For me the finale was a total saving grace for the series, as I finally got the kind of show I wanted. It was a pity that I had a few weeks of a dampened heart before we reached the excellent finale that I wanted.
The world and fourth wall breaking approach and how Jennifer Walters negotiated her way out of the finale was some of the greatest Marvel TV stories ever told. It stayed truthful to the comic character, and it showed that Marvel had not lost sight of what made its universe more interesting than the reboot after reboot DC Extended Universe (DCEU). It showed that there are many ways to tell a superhero story, and superhero stories are not genre bound.
She-Hulk Attorney at Law had a number of great characters. Though I am not particularly fond of Madisynn, new characters such as Nikki (played spectacularly by Ginger Gonzaga), Mallory Book (played by Hamilton grad Renée Elise Goldsberry) and Pug (with Josh Sagarra) all made this ‘little legal show’ so much more interesting.
I was disheartened with She-Hulk Attorney at Law for a second but it proved that Marvel still has something interesting up its sleeve after all.
