The Marvel Cinematic Universe has featured television content since the earliest days, but the modern entries seem to follow certain rules that make many of them feel the same. While the concept has come in stages, the Disney Plus era of MCU shows has been the most prolific and the most controversial.
She-Hulk: Lawyer is a hotly debated Marvel outing. Some viewers can’t get past the obnoxious look of the CGI, while others can’t stand the show’s sense of humor. However, the show’s fans love its unique legal sitcom format and its unique superhero stories. It’s a polarizing show, but it deviates from the Disney Plus format in several ways.
She-Hulk is the first full-length comedy to make it onto the streaming service. Every bit of Marvel content exists in the superhero genre, but they also mix with other genres to make the experience work. Most series are best described as action comedies. The main draw is the exciting fights or hardcore fight scenes and the writing tends to take on a snarky tone. In three episodes, She-Hulk showed one thing that can be described as an action scene, and it was basically cut off. Obviously this is more of a side effect of Disney obsessively cutting almost every instance of VFX to save every possible cent at the expense of their content, but it also changes the tone. The quintessential Disney Plus series feels closer to prestige TV in terms of running time, while She-HulkIts format follows something more akin to multi-camera sitcoms.
The only other live-action Disney Plus Marvel series to use a 30-minute format was the show that started it all, WandaVision. Interestingly, both shows use that runtime for the same reason. WandaVision is explicitly a pastiche of sitcoms from the past decades, while She-Hulk is a contemporary sitcom. The shows have little in common, but because of this simple decision they enter into a conversation with each other. Wanda Maximoff’s story is one of the weirdest and most cross-border shows of the MCU experiment. The length actually changes as the artifice of the sitcom format fades. The final episode will be a full 50-minute regular Marvel show. She-Hulk does not use the format to comment on past sitcoms or disguise its esoteric horror in the language of something familiar and charming. It does it because it’s the format that works best for comedy.
Most comedy films are considerably shorter than films of other genres. It can be very difficult to keep a funny story going for long. Ask any person about the funniest thing they’ve seen on TV, they’ll probably talk about a 3-5 minute sketch. The funniest thing in a movie is often a well-crafted vignette that may or may not tie in with the rest of the movie’s story. Concise is the soul of humor, and it’s often harder to keep a laugh going than a sense of suspense, an air of terror, or even a heart-pounding action blockbuster. Sitcoms usually last about half an hour, because keeping the standard A-story, B-story, and runner format for a full hour is like trying to stretch a knock-knock joke in a TED talk.
She-Hulk has a first season of 9 episodes. If the show continues its current runtime, it will be about four and a half hours long. WandaVision ended about 5 hours and 50 minutes, Moon Knight sits fifteen minutes less than 5 hours. Loki, Falcon and the Winter Soldier, and hawk eye all lands somewhere between four and five hours, usually leaning on the long side. She-Hulk doesn’t seem to be much shorter than other MCU shows, but it divides its time differently. Fans are divided on the length of MCU shows. Some think they’re too short, while others think they’d be better served by a feature film’s two-hour runtime. if She-Hulk will eventually be the same general run time, interestingly the weekly experience will be different for those tuning in.
The shorter runtime of each episode of She-Hulk serves the format of the show well. It allows the individual jokes to land, breathe and move on. Legal proceedings often work by hearing a new case each week and introducing a series of new plaintiffs, witnesses, and dependents with each episode. She-Hulk spent the first episode establishing the base story, the second episode introduces the first major superhero case, and the third episode resolves that story. It feels like the first act of a movie, suggesting the possibility that the next three episodes may set the stakes and the last three will be the payouts. She-Hulk works better as a 30 minute show, and it’s good to see Disney play with its formats, at least a little bit, to better serve the story.
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