If you’re paying for Disney+ and you’re a conservative, just know that one of the platform’s most prominent shows isn’t just accidentally going out of its way to offend you.
It’s doing it deliberately.
“She-Hulk: Attorney at Law” probably won’t be back for a second season, but it got its licks in during the the one opportunity the über-woke Marvel show got.
In case you missed it, the plot is pretty much in the title. It’s She-Hulk. She’s an attorney. Sometimes she does superhero stuff. Sometimes she does lawyerly stuff. Sometimes she does real life stuff, a lot of which conspicuously revolves around her sex life. (A reviewer for reliably leftist outlet Polygon wrote that “‘She-Hulk’ is easily one of the horniest shows currently streaming on Disney Plus, and for that, one of the most refreshing.” Your mileage may vary on that “refreshing” bit.)
The series had a nine-episode run in 2022 and, despite garnering a bit of positive press and some fandom, seems unlikely to return due to budget constraints, Bounding Into Comics reported in January.
However, as the outlet noted regarding an interview that She-Hulk/Jennifer Walters actress Tatiana Maslany gave to a British publication last month, maybe the fandom might have been enough to justify the budget had they not gone out of their way to deliberately antagonize less woke viewers.
Speaking to the U.K. Independent’s Tom Murray about how Maslany and the cast were able to “handle the inevitable wave of sexist backlash” the series generated, in his eyes, Maslany credited “She-Hulk: Attorney at Law” creator Jessica Gao for trolling those who didn’t like the show.
“I think what’s exciting … exciting, ha. I think what’s fun about it is that Jessica Gao built into the story that people were going to troll us,” she said.
As Murray notes in the April 18 piece: “A scene in the third episode, for example, airs fictional social media comments about Maslany’s character such as: ‘Why does every superhero have to be a woman now?’ Sound familiar?”
Do you have a Disney+ subscription?
Not really, but if you can’t provide an actual controversy, just make one up: “When we started to get the same responses that [Gao] had actually baked into the writing, it felt like part of the fun,” Maslany told Murray.
Nor is this the first time she’s made these remarks about deliberately alienating Marvel fans, either.
Take a 2022 interview she did with Variety which coincided with the final episode of the first — and probably only — season of the show: “Jessica Gao is a genius and knows about the culture we’re living in and her position in it when she’s writing these stories about a woman superhero,” she said.
“She knows what that response is going to be,” Maslany added.
“As a cast, it was delightful sending each other these troll responses, like ‘Oh my god, give them a week and then they’re going to literally see this pop up verbatim in the show and become the villains of the show.’ It was thrilling.”
“I think we blew our budget,” she said during a livestreamed interview in January, “and Disney was like, ‘No thanks.’”
It probably didn’t help that Maslany called Disney CEO Bob Iger, who’s been desperately trying to stop the monetary hemorrhaging at the House of Mouse, “completely out of touch” during the SAG-AFTRA strike.
“In those moments, you’re so heated up,” she told the Independent.
“It’s hard to articulate yourself in a way that you want when you’re on the picket line with everybody.”
Of course, it doesn’t help matters, either, when a lavishly budgeted superhero streaming title has its star openly admitting, as Disney tries to back away from a divisive lightning rod in the culture wars, that the show she’s starring in essentially is trolling half its potential audience.
Speaking of out of touch…
