Adrianne Palicki Cast as Wonder Woman

Adrianne Palicki (Friday Night Lights, Lone Star, Legion) has been cast in the title role for NBC’s Wonder Woman. Not a tough task since Palicki was the only person invited to test for the role. The Daily Beast has an early draft of the pilot. In it, Wonder Woman has three identities (Wonder Woman, Diana Themyscira and “mousy” assistant Diana Price).

The pilot episode, which Kelley notes is designed to run “without commercial interruption,” revolves around Los Angeles-based mega-billionaire Diana—who collects planes and a multitude of transforming aircraft called “Ultimates” (no invisible plane in sight here)—as she attempts to take down an evil pharmaceutical company run by morally corrupt scientist Veronica Cale, who is mass-producing a human-growth hormone that is causing its users, mostly black inner city youth, to die. Along the way, she tackles criminals, a Senate subcommittee, and a broken heart, the latter courtesy of lost love Steve Trevor.
Managing to be both cloying and tragically un-hip, Kelley’s Wonder Woman script seems an about-face for this 70-year-old iconic character. Merchandise meetings and legal jargon jostle uncomfortably with superheroics, pajama parties with saving the world.
The result is a Wonder Woman who is more like Kelley’s Ally McBeal than the feminist superhero who stands side-by-side with her fellow DC icons Superman and Batman. This is a woman whose feelings are hurt by people commenting on her breast size, who is looking for love in all the wrong places, and who wants to have it all! (No sign of a unisex bathroom yet but other Kelley tropes seem liberally scattered throughout the script. Fortunately, there’s no dancing baby.) But the stilted dialogue and bizarre narrative conceits pale in comparison with some of the sacrilege being committed here.

I like the part where David E. Kelly turns a strong, determined superhero into a raging bag of hormones and insecurity. I can’t wait for the part where one of the criminals she tries to takes down asks her about her feelings and they have a good cry about it.