It was a relatively quiet week last week for our Diana… if you discount the massively big spoilers for Wonder Woman that a French magazine has revealed (I’ll spoiler cloak them for you if you don’t want to read them):
Why did Zeus create the Amazons? Because shaping man in his image made his son Ares, incidentally a god of war, mad with jealousy, he convinces the guys to confront each other. To restore harmony between them, Zeus created the Amazons that Ares reduced to slavery. The Amazons revolt with the help of Zeus, who will die of the hand of his son having had time to find Themyscira, their haven of peace where they will grow Diana. (…) Diana Prince becomes Wonder Woman by helping Steve Trevor and a squad of proud arm-in-law in search of one who wants to wipe humanity off the map with deadly gas.
That’s not my translation, BTW (sacre bleu!).
Anyway, if true, that’s an interesting amalgam of all the Wonder Woman origin stories, including Greg Rucka’s current one and even Joss Whedon’s failed movie script, that’s probably going to annoy every fan with a minimum of one detail – you pick which one annoys you most – not least because it’s now about a couple of gods rather than at least one goddess. Let’s see how it all pans out on-screen, though.
In comics, there’s not a been much new. The first issue of Justice League/Power Rangers turnedup but beyond the alternative cover, no Diana.
She calls on gods, he calls on the power of a T-rex. Meet Jason, the Red Ranger, in JUSTICE LEAGUE/POWER RANGERS! http://bit.ly/2jc8SEt
Posted by Wonder Woman on Thursday, 12 January 2017
That means that after the jump, we’ll be looking at Wonder Woman (Rebirth) #14, Batman ’66 Meets Wonder Woman ’77 #4 and Justice League vs Suicide Squad #4, but not necessarily in that order. See you in a click.
The West Wing is increasingly looking not just like wishful thinking but science-fiction – certainly, it was very much a product of its time and that time has now passed. But it inspired love among many of its viewers, including Hamilton creator Lin-Manuel Miranda. A self-professed superfan, he’s created a rap tribute to the show for ‘The West Wing Weekly’ podcast. Why not give it a listen? Maybe on Thursday.
It’s “What have you been watching?”, my chance to tell you what movies and TV I’ve been watching recently and your chance to recommend anything you’ve been watching.
Although Amazon’s finally got round to releasing the first season of Sneaky Pete, there’s not been a whole lot that’s new new in the past week, which means I’ve only had Pure (Canada: CBC) and Emerald City (US: NBC; UK: 5*) to review since the last WHYBW. Sorry about that. I’ll try to watch some boxsets when I have the chance.
All the same, for sures, later this week, I’ll be passing a third-episode verdict on Emerald City, which means that after the jump, I’ll be looking at LethalWeapon, Man Seeking Woman, Sherlock and Shooter, as well as the return of The Great Indoors.
But there has been one another new show that I watched this week:
Workin’ Moms (Canada: CBC) Three Canadian mums who have just had babies are ready to start working again. And that’s about it really for plot, although given one’s a high-flying career woman and first-time mother (the show’s creator, writer and director Catherine “daughter of Ivan” Reitman), one’s a no-nonsense psychiatrist mother-of-two (Dani Kind), and the third is a slightly unstable lesbian realtor who carried her partner’s child (Juno Rinaldi)*, you can see there’s a certain variety of experiences being catered for the show.
And indeed that’s really what the show is: a comedy-drama very specifically about the experience of returning to work after having had babies. And when you think about it, while there are shows that have had single mums as heroines and there have been shows that have had mums as characters in the backgrounds, they’ve mostly either got families already or it’s all about the babies and what it’s like to have a baby. It’s almost never been focused on what work is like once you have a baby.
And to be honest, it’s that interestingly specific viewpoint that’s the show’s main and in fact only selling point. The show thinks it’s quite exciting and innovative, such as when it has topless, normal-looking older women in the first five minutes of the episode, which is punningly titled Bare (which works on lots of levels – eg there’s a bear later, there’s a grizzly mum and, of course, they’re laid bare by the experience of being a mum). But it’s not quite the treasure trove of anecdotes and insight that it thinks it is, and frequently it just bubbles along, not doing much. All the same, it was insightful and offered some nuggets that I’d not seen elsewhere on TV. The characters were well drawn and avoided stereotyping, even the men. Plus it had a bear.
Not bad. Not great. Not to be confused with CBC’s Newborn Moms, either.
* There’s a fourth mum (Jessalyn Wanlim) but she wasn’t in the first episode, as far as I noticed.
