The ongoing discourse surrounding the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s She-Hulk: Attorney at Law is fascinating, because it’s become so self-aware and obliviously perplexing that it feels like a storyline ripped straight out of the recently-concluded Disney Plus series.
All you need to do is look at the respective Rotten Tomatoes scores accrued by Tatiana Maslany’s franchise debut to see just how much art is imitating life. Among critics, She-Hulk has been Certified Fresh with an impressive 85 percent score. On the other hand, a user average of only 33 percent makes it the single lowest-rated film or television project to emerge throughout the entire Marvel Studios era dating back to 2008.
Attorney at Law was also the subject of a review-bombing campaign before it had even aired, while the presence of nefarious internet schemers and trolls as the real villains of the piece ended up igniting exactly the sort of online fury the showrunners had not only predicted, but actively mocked throughout the nine-episode run.
Proving once again that some things will always go over somebody’s head, an intrepid Redditor posed a lenghty question asking is She-Hulk was “made to fail”. One of the top-voted comments at the time of writing positively incinerates the entire argument in a roundabout fashion by stating the story was “incomprehensible to people who are unwilling to or incapable of empathizing with women”, which is exactly what all of the key creatives had expected and since gone on to address in various interviews.
The ongoing She-Hulk conversations are arguably infinitely more interesting than anything that happened onscreen, so long may they continue, because at least it keeps the half-hour legal comedy in the public consciousness ahead of a potential season 2 renewal.