‘Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man,’ I’m sorry I doubted you
This is your friendly neighborhood Spider-Fan reporting in with news of Spider-Man’s latest small-screen outing. It’s really good! Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man, which we will shorten to YFNSM, presented interesting takes on old characters and brought in some exciting new characters and storylines.
I’m all the more impressed because I didn’t think they could pull it off.
I’m here for any Spider-Man show, but I admit my enthusiasm was dampened a little when it was revealed that YFNSM would be about a teenage Peter Parker in high school. I felt like we’ve had enough of those, you know? The last couple of Spidey shows also featured a teenage Peter Parker, and I was keen for him to grow up the way the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s Peter (eventually) got to. There’s a part of me that dislikes the assertion that Spider-Man has to be “young” to be interesting. It bleeds into the comics, where Peter isn’t allowed to marry Mary Jane Watson (again) or have a child.
I was also unsure about the supporting cast. In my mind, a good Spider-Man adaption lives or dies on the strength of its supporting cast, and the first leaks just seemed a little … out there. I had no idea who Pearl Pangan was or what she was doing in Spider-Man. I knew Nico Minoru a little better but couldn’t see her as part of Spider-Man’s world. And Tombstone as one of Spider-Man’s peers? That definitely had me raising an eyebrow.
But I was wrong about all of it.
Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man gave us something fresh
It was the best possible choice for YFNSM to use some more obscure characters and to age down some others. Tombstone, aka Lonnie, ended up being one of the highlights of the season. The show didn’t shy away from showing the microaggressions he was subjected to as a Black teen and the struggles he went through trying to find his place in the world. YFNSM would be a much poorer show without him, just as it would be without Nico, who was a great best friend for this version of Peter. I also grew to like Pearl and the equally unknown to me character Asha. I adored Asha, in fact, and walked away with her as my favorite of the minor characters.
Additionally, as probably the biggest fan of the Osborns you will ever meet, I was delighted with how they were presented in the show. Some people threw their toys out of the pram over Norman and Harry being race-swapped, but that didn’t matter to me—what mattered was the essence of the characters being respected, and they were.
I will confess that when the first episode of YFNSM hit, I wasn’t very impressed with the changes they’d made to Spider-Man’s backstory. I was annoyed that Uncle Ben had been taken out of the equation, and I didn’t like the change to how Peter gets bitten by the fateful spider. But the season finale of the show wiped out all of my annoyances. Without giving anything away, the link between Peter and his powers is recontextualized in a very clever way. And, although the ghost of Uncle Ben isn’t as present in this series as I would like, there’s still a lot of opportunity for Peter to learn from someone else (like a certain mysterious imprisoned man, I won’t reveal his identity) that with “great power comes great responsibility.”
All in all, I’m really glad to have watched this new take on Spider-Man, and I can’t wait for season 2.
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