Marvel’s Best Show Is the One Men Online Want You to Think Sucks
The tapestry of Marvel Cinematic Universe shows on Disney+ has been something to behold. As fans have speculated about how has each project factored into the ongoing “Multiverse Saga”, and what characters from other shows will be folded back into things next, there’s also just been a lot of discourse about the shows themselves.
Everyone has their personal favorites, but some have been met with a more opinionated consensus online than others… but apparently, that doesn’t necessarily equate to actual viewership. According to Brad Winderbaum, Head of Streaming, Television, and Animation at Marvel Studios, one of the most polarizing shows to come out of the Disney+ era is much more of a hit than certain pundits would lead you to believe.
Comments that Winderbaum made during a recent appearance on The Escape Pod have gone viral, in which he reveals that She-Hulk: Attorney at Law was one of Marvel Studios’ best-performing shows on Disney+. As he put it: “It just hit the general audience.”
Unsurprisingly, this soundbite has been met with a pretty wide array of responses — just like She-Hulk itself has, ever since it first premiered in August of 2022. Comicsgaters and just plain-old misogynists made their stance on the show very clear, attempting to review bomb it or spread false rumors online. This was before the show even premiered, and before took a self-aware approach to that exact kind of fandom, having the season-long “big bad” be a men’s rights organization known as the Intelligencia.
In Defense of She-Hulk…
While this treatment of female-fronted Disney+ shows has been nothing new, as evident by the later treatment of Star Wars: The Acolyte and fellow MCU series Agatha All Along and Ironheart, the She-Hulk of it all has only evolved even further. In the years since the show debuted, full-on conspiracy theories have been peddled online about the show and its star, Tatiana Maslany. She has even poked fun at these rumors — particularly one that she’s a “woke feminist” who was cut from 2024’s Deadpool & Wolverine, got mad at star Ryan Reynolds, and proceeded to sue Disney over it — during appearances on the Comedy Bang! Bang! podcast.
Again, everyone has their personal preferences about the MCU’s Disney+ shows… but the idea that She-Hulk was a colossal failure has always felt like a lie blatantly peddled by certain groups of men online. It makes sense, years later, that the “general audience” would gravitate towards She-Hulk: it expands the “family” of one of Marvel’s most iconic heroes of all time, while also being accessible enough to enjoy without needing to have caught up with the recent goings-on of the MCU. It didn’t hurt that it was genuinely funny, with Maslany’s Jennifer Walters taking a very charming and often-unconventional approach to being a superhero.
She-Hulk was also, easily, one of the strongest shows in terms of understanding its protagonist and the tone that their comic appearances have. Some sequences felt pulled directly from John Byrne’s tenure on The Sensational She-Hulk in the 1980s, down to her breaking the fourth wall, entering the MCU’s Disney+ homepage, and eventually making her way into the “real world” and meeting a robotic version of Marvel Studios chief Kevin Feige in the season finale.
If you didn’t, personally, resonate with She-Hulk, that’s okay. But there’s a massive difference between that, and leading a smear campaign against the show’s entire existence… or attempting to argue that nobody cared about it. As a fan of the character, I already know that’s fundamentally untrue, and it sounds like Marvel Studios has the receipts to literally prove it.
Now, does this mean we can get a second season? At very least, I’d settle for her jumping over to the East Coast in a future season of Daredevil: Born Again, or seeing her help Simon Williams and Trevor Slattery out in the upcoming second season of Wonder Man.
(featured image: Disney+)
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