Wonder Woman 2011

It's not good. It's not bad. It's not even interesting. Wonder Woman (the un-aired 2011 pilot) is full of half-baked ideas. If it just picked one of the half-baked ideas, it could have made it. Instead, it just tries to throw all ideas it was even remotely interested in, and hope one sticks.

I was wondering if I really could criticize a pilot for trying to set up too much for a series, but I thought about it a bit more, thinking about pilots of other shows. A pilot has to do so much already. it has to introduce a bunch of characters, the main premise, and the setting (which is often a character in and of itself.)

I don't think this pilot understood that concept. Each character is glossed over, there is no clear main premise, and the setting is poked at, but mostly, again, ignored.

Wonder Woman opens like a crime procedural's victim of the day, which, incidentally  is the most characterized person in the pilot. He's a black teenage boy, who presumably receives a scholarship to go to college, before a "near exploding heart" causes eye-bleeding. (I don't get it either.)

Then, ideas are introduced and dropped in quick succession:

* Wonder Woman sells action dolls and other products to fund her crime-fighting.
* Wonder Woman doesn't play well with police.
* Wonder Woman breaks up with her boyfriend before becoming Wonder Woman because he might get hurt.
* Wonder Woman inexplicably has an alternate identity.
* Wonder Woman has a cat.
* Wonder Woman is a Woman, hear her roar.
* Her ex-boyfriend is back, but he's married!

The only idea that looks like it'll get followed up on is the idea that she doesn't play well with police, but the ex-boyfriend shows up, saves the day, and it looks like this too will be quickly ignored.

Really, the most interesting idea here, and the most topical idea (even during the time it was made) is the idea of the relationship between the super-hero and the police. If the pilot had ended with Wonder Woman potentially facing legal ramifications for what she did, as parts of the episode seemed to be building up to, (Like a pundit exclaiming she wasn't exempt from search and seizure laws) then it might have been going somewhere.

However, it seems mostly confused.

I don't know what it is about a female super-hero that seems to get writers confused. You give the hero tits and suddenly you want to shoehorn in rom-com misunderstandings like her ex-boyfriend having been in town for a while but not talking to her and being married, alternating with feminist outbursts (like her saying that the 'tits' on the action figures are too big to properly represent her.)

I would have been fine with them treating her as an essentially male super-hero for the pilot episode. You'd have had plenty of time to show us she was a woman.