She-Hulk: Attorney at Law (2022) Review
-1/10
Official trailer
A lawyer is in a car accident with her cousin, receives his blood, and discovers she can transform while retaining her personality entirely. She’s then assigned to a superhuman law division.
The minus one is the lowest score of Phase 4 and it’s a judgment about attention. The premise is strong, the lead is capable, and the series spends its energy arguing with an imagined audience instead of using either.
This show wore me out. It had a lawyer who turns green, a whole universe of lawsuits waiting to be filed, and Tatiana Maslany, and it spent most of its running time wagging a finger at people who weren’t in the room. Watching a premise this good get wasted this carefully is its own special kind of irritating.
The three or four episodes that behave like a legal comedy are the evidence. They have a client, a problem and a courtroom, and they work. The show treats that structure as a thing to keep interrupting.
The Premise Was Excellent
A world with a decade of documented property damage, alien invasions, resurrections and public identity disputes would generate enormous quantities of litigation, and almost none of it is ever been dramatized.
The episodes that engage with this are the good ones. A shapeshifter using another person’s appearance as a business asset raises an actual question about likeness rights. A parole hearing for a supervillain is a real procedural problem, and the client is a sorcerer who has been performing at parties. That’s a joke and a case at the same time.
The parole hearing is the best thing in the whole series. Blonsky up for release gives the show a real legal problem and jokes that come straight out of the case. I kept waiting for the writers to notice they’d found the good version and keep doing it. Tatiana Maslany is entirely capable of carrying that show. She’s a precise comic performer with obvious range, and the courtroom material gives her something to play besides commentary. The supporting bench is also there. Ginger Gonzaga’s Nikki, Josh Segarra’s Pug and Renee Elise Goldsberry’s Mallory are three distinct people in an office, and a workplace comedy about superhuman law is sitting fully assembled inside this series.
The opening episode also establishes something good and then drops it. Jennifer transforms and keeps her mind entirely, which the series explains as a lifetime of managing anger in public, and Bruce is visibly put out that decades of work were unnecessary. That’s a real idea about who is permitted to lose their temper, delivered in one exchange and never revisited.
A high concept works when the story takes its own world seriously enough to find the ordinary consequences. Superheroes generate paperwork, and the paperwork is where the unexplored material is. The rule is to follow the premise to its boring implications. Who insures a city after an invasion, who’s liable for a resurrected person’s debts, what happens to a will. That’s where a familiar genre becomes new.
If you build a machine like this and then decline to run it, the reader can see the unused engine, and every episode spent elsewhere reads as avoidance.
It Argues With Its Audience
The series addresses its own reception repeatedly, in dialogue, in asides to camera, and in the construction of episodes designed around anticipated complaints. There’s a version of that which works. Fleabag speaks to camera and the device reveals a person managing her own presentation. Here it’s used to pre-empt criticism. That requires the audience to already be party to a dispute they may know nothing about.
The effect is a narrowing. A viewer who has followed the discourse recognizes the references, and a viewer who hasn’t is watching a character respond to statements nobody in the story has made. That choice also converts the antagonists into stand-ins. A group of men in an online forum resenting the protagonist is a real phenomenon and an extremely limited villain, because their only capability is being unpleasant. That isn’t a threat a story can build around. Titania is the same problem in a different tone. An influencer who sues over a name and exists to be defeated in a courtroom is a good joke and a thin recurring antagonist, and the series brings her back three times expecting the joke to have accumulated something. Titania wears me out. She’s one joke about a trademark, and the show keeps bringing her back as if the joke earns interest. By her third appearance I’d have ruled in her favor just to get her out of the courtroom.
The Finale
The last episode breaks its own frame entirely. The protagonist exits her show, walks through a studio lot, argues with an artificial intelligence about the script, and demands a different ending.
As a formal move it’s bold and it’s executed with confidence, and the problem is what it concedes. A series that resolves by complaining about its own finale has agreed that the finale was a problem, and has substituted a discussion of the problem for a solution.
It also takes the wind out of what the series had been building. Every legal thread, the relationship material and the personal stakes are resolved offscreen by fiat, because the character has requested that they be. I found the finale insufferable. A character walks off her own show to complain about the ending, and the show seems to think that counts as an ending. If a manuscript stopped in its last chapter to argue with its own editor, I’d send it back. Underneath the device is a legitimate observation, that third acts in this franchise are formulaic and unsatisfying. Stating that inside one of them doesn’t fix it, and the series is left having made the criticism instead of the correction.
The Daredevil episode is the counterexample that proves what was available. Charlie Cox arrives, the show becomes a comedy about two lawyers with secret identities dating, and it’s the most enjoyable hour in the series by a distance. Nothing in it is about the reception of anything.
Never write to your critics inside the work. It feels like confidence and it reads as grievance, and it permanently narrows your audience to people who already know the argument.
The deeper cost is that it changes the subject. A book that answers its reviewers is a book about its own reception. That has a very small readership and a very short shelf life.
Whatever you’ve been accused of, the reply is the next book being good, delivered without reference to the accusation. Anything else hands the argument a permanence it wouldn’t otherwise have had.
The Effects Problem
The character is a digital creation present in most scenes, and the rendering was widely criticized on release, with reporting since describing vendors working to compressed schedules across overlapping projects.
That’s a structural issue instead of a creative one and it belongs to the phase instead of to this series. A slate of seventeen projects in two years produced a shortage of capacity, and the work most dependent on digital character animation absorbed it. The consequence for this show is specific. The show delivers a comedy relying on close performance through a model that can’t always carry a small expression, so the precision Maslany brings passes through something that blunts it.
I don’t blame the animators, who were buried under the slate. I blame whoever decided that a comedy living on a raised eyebrow should put its star inside a digital model for most of every scene. Maslany does lovely small work, and I keep losing it inside a face that looks like a video game cutscene with a law degree.
It also removes the cheapest version of the premise. A legal comedy could have been shot with a performer in a room, and the format chosen made every scene an effects shot in a period when effects capacity was the scarcest resource in the industry.
There’s an argument that the smoothing in the rendering was deliberate, to keep Maslany’s expressions readable, and whatever the intention, the result sits in the uncanny middle where a face is close enough to human to be measured against one. A comedy can’t afford that, because timing depends on the audience reading an expression instantly.
What Is Left
The minus one is severe and it’s a rating of the experience instead of the people. Maslany is good, the supporting cast is good, and the concept is among the best the franchise has had. What the score tones is a series that had a subject available and chose a different one. The available subject was superhuman law. The chosen subject was the reception of superhuman stories and of this series in particular. There are a few hours of the good version in here. The shapeshifter case, the parole hearing, the office material and a wedding episode that finds real comedy in a professional obligation.
The series also has no continuation. That’s its own verdict. A show built to argue about its reception received one and stopped, and a different argument about something else entirely has long since replaced whatever it was responding to. That’s exactly what happens to any work that gets built on a passing dispute instead of on a single person who has something real to lose over the course of the story itself.
Everything else is a conversation, and the conversation has already ended. That’s the problem with writing about one. Arguments date at a speed that stories don’t, and a work built on a dispute from 2022 is now a document about 2022.
Topical arguments have the shortest shelf life of any material. A story about a person lasts. A story about a controversy expires with the controversy, usually within a year.
If a current dispute is your subject, build it around somebody with a personal stake and a small want. The argument becomes context and the person becomes the story. That’s the only version that survives. Test it by projecting forward. Will a reader in ten years need a footnote to understand why a scene is there? If so, the scene is about a moment instead of a person.
Should you watch She-Hulk?
Watch the shapeshifter case and the parole hearing, and then stop. They’re the two places the good series shows through, and I liked both enough to be angry about the rest. Everything else is a show arguing with its own reviews, and the argument moved on long ago while the show was still talking. That’s how a premise this strong and a lead this good end up at minus one, and I think it deserved every inch of that score.
