She-Hulk: Attorney at Law (Disney +)

Okay. We might have a lot to get through with this one.

That was a very "Swing for the fences" type of episode, and while I admire that kind of risk-taking storytelling (generally speaking) I want to review the episode on its own terms, not simply praise it for taking risks. As far as polarizing risk-taking episodes that you either love-or-hate go, it's not a hard-and-fast rule for me, but I have found that if I love a love-it-or-hate-it episode upon first viewing. I love it MUCH less with each subsequent viewing. And if I HATE one of those risky episodes or movies on a first glance, I always HATE it less each time I see it after the initial time. So we've established that for this kind of episode, regardless of my strong feelings now, they will inevitably soften over time, so take everything I saw here with a grain of salt.

My initial impression was overwhelmingly negative. I disliked every inch of the episode with every fiber of my being. I would respect the idea of Jen taking Marvel to task for turning her show into a dumb formula, if not for the fact that most of that is spent outside the damn episode. It's Jen's show? Then why isn't she allowed to exist on it? What good is this meta nonsense? If Jen's ideas of how to end the episode were solid, why not just just do them? Because let me be as brutally honest as I can. That meta stuff was some of the most unfunny, "self-aware" humor I have ever seen. It wasn't funny, it was painful. It didn't make me laugh, it made me cringe. And frankly I am not a fan of occasionally doing fourth wall breaking projects in the exact same franchise that tries to play things straight. Am I taking a shot at Deadpool too by saying that? Probably. But even if I were, neither of Deadpool's movies tried this hard to be ironically hip and lovable. I don't feel like I'm not in on the joke here. I feel like the joke is not actually funny, and nobody on the show is smart enough to understand that.

Regardless of the fact that if and when I see this and the rest of the season again I'll almost certainly think less brooding thoughts about it, the truth is it perfectly continues the Marvel Studios Disney+ streak of creating a can't-miss irresistible premise right out of the gate, and wind up limping to the barn by the end of the first season. In this case, both this show's legs were shot off and the poor show is being dragged behind a runaway haycart by a spooked horse.

My advice for Marvel Studio going forward: No more TV shows. Whatever is in the pipeline, finish it, and then freaking move on. Go exclusively back to movies. If it were just a case of bad TV shows, I might think differently. But Kevin Feige is being spread so thin it's starting to actually effect the quality of the damn movies. As long as Eternals, Doctor Strange 2, and Thor 4 sucked (and they all did) Marvel needs to get its poo together and its head on right.

This was probably the worst Marvel Studios thing I've seen. And what alarms me is that if that's so, it's probably not the worst thing by a HUGE margin. Marvel Studios has started to deliver a slew of crappy movies and TV episodes to compare this negatively to, which is alarming to me. This is really concerning. 0.