Welcome to the weekly TV thread. There’s no prompt today.

The Original TV Score Selection of the Week is “Simon Williams to Set” from Wonder Man. It was composed by Joel P West, a regular collaborator with Destin Daniel Cretton—who co-created Wonder Man with veteran Community writer Andrew Guest, Wonder Man’s showrunner, and was the director of the half-hour MCU show’s first two episodes—and a musician who’s allergic to dots after middle initials.

I first encountered West’s music when he scored 2013’s Short Term 12, Cretton’s gritty breakout movie—which the director based on his experiences as a social worker—and a far cry from Cretton’s MCU blockbusters (Shang-Chi and the MacGuffin That’s Too Long to Type Out and the upcoming Spider-Man: Brand New Day). The whimsical, Georges Delerue-esque sound of “Simon Williams to Set” is the perfect encapsulation of what kind of MCU show Wonder Man is. It’s not the smashy/grabby kind.

I just finished watching on Hulu Wonder Man’s first season—Disney+ unexpectedly renewed the show for a second season earlier this week—and loved it. (The Avocado’s discussion thread for the first season is here.)

I don’t have Disney+ and don’t plan on subscribing to it, whereas I’ve been a Hulu subscriber since the early 2010s, a time when I was writing weekly reviews of new episodes of animated shows—whether they were kids’ shows or adult animated sitcoms—for my Blogspot blog. Hulu didn’t have next-day rights to Bob’s Burgers and other Sunday-night Fox “Animation Domination” shows yet. (According to the screen shots I took of Bob’s Burgers and then posted on Blogspot, Hulu didn’t get next-day rights to Bob’s Burgers until 2013.) If I needed to catch one of those Fox shows’ latest episodes for my reviews (my DirecTV receiver box wasn’t working at the time, and DirecTV was never able to fix it), I had to settle for buying the episode at the iTunes Store. At the time, Hulu was beginning to dabble in original animated programming.

Mother Up!, a Canadian-made adult animated sitcom that starred Eva Longoria as a suburban wine mom who just lost her job as a record label exec, was not so good. The Awesomes, a superhero genre parody, was a little better—I said in one of my reviews that Awesomes co-creators Seth Meyers and Mike Shoemaker and their head writer, DC Comics veteran Judd Winick, were trying to do for the superhero team genre what Buck Henry and Leonard Stern did for the superspy genre on Get Smart, which Stern showran—but the Hulu show’s animation by the Bento Box studio didn’t quite measure up to what Titmouse was nicely doing over on the somewhat similar Venture Bros. at the time.

Long after Mother Up! and The Awesomes, I said farewell to my Blogspot blog and stuck with Hulu as it evolved into one of the best streamers in terms of both original animated fare for adults (Solar Opposites wasn’t too shabby) and animated fare that was licensed to Hulu by outsiders. (In addition to past and present “Animation Domination” shows, Hulu carries the entire run of Regular Show, a cartoon I’ve been revisiting, and several of Bandai Namco’s Gundam shows. The 08th MS Team was the only Gundam show I watched on Hulu, but I never finished it. It’s still on Hulu.)

It was wise for me to stick with Hulu all these years because now it’s picking up Marvel Spotlight shows from Disney+, its sister streamer. I like how I don’t have to join Disney+ or pirate Marvel Spotlight shows in order to watch them.

I grew bored with the MCU. It has turned into homework. (Marvel Studios’s mistreatment of visual effects artists is also leaving a sour taste in my mouth.) However, the projects under Marvel Television’s Marvel Spotlight label—a brand Marvel Studios launched to try to attract adult viewers who know nothing about the MCU while also trying to lure back people like myself who quit following the MCU—have so far been more satisfying than most of the MCU projects I watched, whether they were Defenders shows (the Netflix bloat that hampered the first seasons of Daredevil and Jessica Jones put me off watching the rest of Daredevil and Jones’s runs) or post-Endgame MCU movies. Wonder Man is another winner from the Marvel Spotlight side of the MCU.

Like Michael Giacchino’s nifty Werewolf by Night Halloween special (which I had forgotten was the first MCU project under the Marvel Studios Special Presentation label, a completely different label from the Marvel Spotlight one), Wonder Man centers on a guy who has a superpower he can’t (or doesn’t know how to) control. Simon is a struggling Haitian American actor (and a Criterion nerd, just like I am!). His only goal in life is to land his dream role in a reboot of his favorite ’80s superhero movie without his unexplained ability to harness ionic energy being discovered by the public or the Department of Damage Control.

An agency I first encountered in the non-MCU-related (despite Clark Gregg’s reprisal of his MCU role as Agent Coulson) animated version of Ultimate Spider-Man, the DODC wants to investigate Simon’s activities because it considers his powers to be a danger to Los Angeles. The agency tracks down washed-up actor Trevor Slattery after his latest escape from prison and offers him a deal: Spy on Simon for the DODC and gain his trust or go back to prison. Trevor chooses the C.I. job faster than you can say John le Carré.

Other than a scene where Simon uses his superhuman strength to protect Trevor in an alley from a bunch of thugs Trevor has a history with and, well, the final scene of the season, Wonder Man never feels like a standard superhero show. Simon’s ionic energy thing is, again, left unexplained, and Andrew Guest and his writing staff wisely skip in the first season the origin story of his powers or any form of convoluted Treknobabble about them. Wonder Man’s tone is somewhere between Barry and a Twilight Zone comedy episode. Without giving too much of it away, the first season’s final scene is like a big-budget version of the happy ending of a Twilight Zone comedy episode.

Simon’s bumpy journey to his dream role involved a couple of film directors whose names I didn’t expect to see at the beginning of the closing credits of a Disney+ MCU series episode. I remember James Ponsoldt from The Spectacular Now, a 2013 indie movie about teen alcoholism that impressed me in the theater because Ponsoldt never turned it into a two-hour ABC Afterschool Special about drinking. He directed both the first season’s most acclaimed episode, “Doorman,” the Wonder Man episode that is the most like a Twilight Zone comedy episode (however, its ending is a downbeat one), and “Pacoima,” an episode I like even more than “Doorman” because of its rich depiction of Simon’s widowed immigrant mom and Pacoima’s Haitian American community, which Simon’s mom and estranged big brother still belong to.

Jean Elie, who has a minor role as a PA on the set of the Wonder Man reboot Simon and Trevor spend most of the first season preparing themselves for, consulted on the Haitian Kreyól phrases in “Pacoima” (his parents are Haitian) and is best known for playing Ahmal, Issa Dee’s mischievous gay brother, on Insecure. One of Insecure’s episode directors, Stella Meghie (the director of the pivotal Insecure episode where Issa and Molly’s friendship collapses at a block party), helmed the first season’s last two episodes and is another name I didn’t expect to see in the closing credits. I also didn’t expect to see an MCU show taking a cue from Insecure and venturing into a Black neighborhood in L.A. that isn’t Watts or Compton (Issa lived in Inglewood, Inglewood, always up to no good).

I’m a former Marvel Comics reader. (However, I know nothing about the original version of Wonder Man, a character in The West Coast Avengers. I’m way more familiar with Wonderman, the superhero from Robert Smigel’s TV Funhouse who “fights a constant crusade to stop crime and get his alias laid!”) The comic Wonder Man reminds me the most of is Madrox, the late Peter David’s 2004 Marvel Knights miniseries about former X-Factor team member Jamie Madrox’s stint as a private eye and the comedic neo-noir consequences of how he uses his ability to duplicate himself. Madrox had very little to do with the impenetrable continuity of Marvel’s mutant books and was simply a fun five-issue P.I. romp that happened to take place in Marvel’s versions of New York and Chicago.

Wonder Man similarly requires no prior knowledge of the MCU. Trevor’s antics in the first MCU project he appeared in, Iron Man Three, are the reason for his current state in the first season, but they’re revisited in an effective way that doesn’t require watching or rewatching Iron Man Three (my favorite Iron Man movie because of co-writer/director Shane Black’s sharp dialogue, an authentic depiction of PTSD, and the thrilling “barrel of monkeys” rescue scene).

Trevor is the Madrox counterpart on Wonder Man—mistakes from his checkered past come back to bite him—but he doesn’t have any powers that can pull his ass out of trouble. He has to rely on the wits he developed from being an actor.

On this show, Trevor’s quick thinking is as powerful and impressive as ionic energy or the ability to do whatever a spider can. Ben Kingsley has portrayed Trevor for 12 years now, and he perfectly plays Trevor’s arc of going from not having a conscience (it was why he took that acting job in Iron Man Three) to developing one. (That conscience develops due to his unexpected mentorship of Simon, an actor who learns from Trevor how to stop overthinking his roles.) And Kingsley has a great scene partner in Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, who stars as Simon.

One of Kingsley and Abdul-Mateen’s best scenes together is played in total silence, and it’s my favorite “person rewatching an old movie in an L.A. theater” scene since John Travolta’s joyful rewatch of Touch of Evil in a Santa Monica theater in Get Shorty. However, the one flaw in Get Shorty’s Touch of Evil screening scene is that Chili Palmer says out loud Orson Welles and Marlene Dietrich’s final lines from his seat, and nobody in the theater ever shushes him.

Simon and Trevor’s Midnight Cowboy screening scene—Simon first encounters Trevor while rewatching the 1969 movie—is more believable than Chili’s scene. Destin Daniel Cretton, who directed the scene and channeled the scenes in Short Term 12 where he showed Brie Larson’s troubled social worker character stewing in her trauma in silence, wisely chose to have Simon and Trevor re-experiencing Midnight Cowboy in silence.

The Midnight Cowboy screening scene nicely foreshadows without any dialogue both the boyish fascination the introverted Simon expresses towards older movies—it fuels his aspirations to play the next Wonder Man—and the serious side of a life-of-the-party raconteur like Trevor, a side that quietly emerges when he later becomes conflicted about spying for the DODC. The Short Term 12-esque way Cretton allowed the scene to breathe is another thing I didn’t expect to see in an MCU project.

Hopefully, Wonder Man’s second season will be full of wondrous moments just like it.