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The word is that after much retooling, NBC passed on the David E. Kelley Wonder Woman series that I have been kvetching about for the last several months. Woo hoo, it was shaping up to be a total debacle!
It does beg the question of why one comicdom’s most iconic superheroes, and argueably it’s most iconic female superhero, has been in development hell for so long. How many times have we heard about a Wonder Woman movie or tv show being developed, only to have it not see the light of day? This one got closer, as it actually filmed a pilot (partial or complete, I’m not sure of).
I’m not saying this is the one that should have happened, everything I heard about it made me sick to my stomach (except for the casting of Adrianne Palicki, she was great on Friday Night Lights!). I’m just wondering why a new live action Wonder Woman appears to be an impossibility.

A couple of months ago, I posted that David “Ally Mcbeal” Kelley was developing a Wonder Woman series for television, and that I was very open that I did not think Kelley was the right person for the job.  Initially, all the networks passed on the script claiming that it would be too expensive to produce.  But NBC changed executives, and the new regime decided to order the pilot.

Well blogger/TV critic Jace Lacob, has had a look at the script, and it is worse than I had imagined.  You can see his summary here, but it does not bode well at all.  Some things that stick out for me as not just inconsistent to the character, but really bad writing in general are: that Diana is given three identities.  One is Wonder Woman, crime fighter.  Another is as Diana Themyscira, the CEO of an international corporation, who collects transforming aircraft (the hell?).  And finally  as Diana Prince, a mousy assistant.  I don’t get this conceit at all.  It is traditional for super-hero’s to have a super-hero identity, and a separate civilian identity (in fact in the comics she does sort of have three, wonder woman, Diana Prince, and the Princess of the Amazons.  But the princess/wonder woman identities are publicly acknowledged as the same).  But why have two civilian identities?  with two separate residences?  Especially when at least one of the identities, the CEO, sounds to be very recognizable as a public figure.  What is the point of the third identity?  This just makes the character sound a bit psycho.

Anaother red flag, that this is not a Wonder Woman I want to watch is this that as the CEO, she has  in her employ a gaggle of “nerds” whose function seems to be to make sexual inneundo about her.  For example when she instructs them to bone up on something, one replies the he would, “Bone you up right now, boss.”  That she tolerates this is makes her not just unbelievable as Wonder Woman, but as a successful business woman, as well.

Lacob says it best here, about what sounds likely to be one of the worst scenes to ever be filmed;

In the script’s most painful sequence, Diana is subpoenaed by the Senate Judiciary Committee and forced to give testimony about the events in Hollywood. She ends up filibustering about everything under the sun for several pages: the politics of the LAPD (name checking ex-police chiefs Daryl Gates and William Bratton), the economy, stimulus funds, pharmaceutical companies, Roger Clemens, the FDA and the FCC, and how networks will air commercials about erectile dysfunction but not for condoms. It’s clearly meant to be a showcase scene for the actress playing Diana, a calculated bid at awards and social relevance. Congratulations, David E. Kelley, the transformation of Wonder Woman from superhero to personal mouthpiece is now complete. Adding further insult to injury: real-life California Senator Dianne Feinstein is described as giving Diana a thumbs-up.

Pages of rambling about anything that crosses Kelley’s mind, is the big triumphant moment?  In a show about a super-hero?  What?

And apparently the episode ends with her weeping over her romantic woes!  DO NOT WANT!

Yeah it sounds horrible, and I do not get what NBC was thinking.  Are Harry’s Law, and the Cape doing that well?

Anyway here are the original concept sketches for Wonder Woman, way back in the forties.

Yes, she is wearing a bustier, but she was a warrior damnit!

And just because I think it’s awesome, here is Project Runway’s Chris March as Wonder Woman.

According to this article Warner Brothers is developing a Wonder Woman series for television.

http://livefeed.hollywoodreporter.com/2010/10/wonder-woman-tv-show.html

It does not say how far into development they have gotten, or which network will likely air it.  It does say that they have chosen David E. Kelley to be showrunner.  This seems like a bad fit to me.  Kelley has had success in the past, creating such shows as, Ally McBeal, Chicago Hope, The Practice, and Picket Fences, none of which have much in common with Wonder Woman.  I don’t know what the plans they have in store for the show, but I would think it would have to be an action drama to some extent, and Kelley doesn’t have much experience with action.  I am not much of a Kelley fan, I have not been able to stick with one of his shows for much more than a season or two.  In my experience, he tends run out of character driven stories pretty quickly, and then relies on increasingly  absurd plot twists, and controversial stunts, just for the sake of controversy.  His characters are usually very quirky, and as the series progress they seem to lose any humanity that makes them relatable, devolving into a walking mass of unusual ticks.  This does not bode well for his Wonder Woman, as though she has gone through many different characterizations over the course of her sixty plus years of being published, she has never come across to me as either quirky, or neurotic (another Kelley main stay).  I guess we will have to wait and see what comes of it.

I met Andy Mangels recently, when he was a featured guest at Gaylaxicon, and I was intrigued to learn about his online Wonder Woman museum.
On October 26th, he is holding the 4th annual Wonder Woman Day, which includes an art auction with art donated by Alex Ross and Gail Simone among others. I would love to find a way to buy some of the prints featured on this site, but I haven’t figured out how yet. Chime in if you find a way!

Because my library has them in trade, I started reading the 1980s relaunches of Superman and Wonder Woman.  The Superman trades collect John Byrne’s Man of Steel mini-series in Volume 1, and in subsequent volumes include his ongoing Superman and Action comics, along with Marv Wolfman and Jerry Ordway’s Adventures of Superman, along with some cross-overs with Legion of Super-Heroes and Booster Gold along the way.  The Wonder Woman collections are from the George Perez and Len Wein reintroduction of Diana to Man’s World.  Our heroes re-meet their iconic villains for the first time in these post-Crisis on Infinite Earth stories, which is a little weird, particularly now when you have continuity being turned end over end, and three different sets of Legions meeting each other.  But they’re so much fun to read, and particularly fun to look at how Byrne, Ordway and Perez are drawing everything.  Their clothes, their hair, their computers, everything is so very ’80s.  Is that Lois Lane or a slimmer version of Brigitte Nielson?

The stories seem a little quaint after so many years of darkness that we’ve been seeing recently.  There seems to be less risk, even though these take place before death’s revolving door.  Byrne even makes a point of telling everyone that all these super-villain attacks in downtown Metropolis are taking place on Sunday when no one is any of the office buildings being smashed.  How considerate of the bad guys.  There are some casualties, in the form of the recently introduced minor characters.  But you really don’t feel anything really bad is going to happen to our heroes any time soon.

There is something about these relaunches that makes me wonder, though:  Superman and Wonder Woman got restarted, but what about the third member of the Trinity?  Why didn’t Batman get reset at the time?  Were his books just selling that much more?  Was there some reset that I’m just not remembering?