Since the announcement that NBC wouldn't be picking up the Wonder Woman television show, many have speculated as to why the Peacock decided to turn down the Princess. And it's not just NBC who had a stake in the high-production pilot--Warner Bros., the owners of DC Comics, clearly did not want to see one of their star properties fail before given a chance to be on prime time.
Warner Bros. Television CEO Peter Roth recently spoke out on why he thinks NBC turned the series down. And while his words are fairly diplomatic with regard to NBC, he actually puts more blame on viewers who he thinks wouldn't be able to embrace the show's concept. Check out his quote below.
"I think Wonder Woman was a very well-crafted pilot...But after seeing the announcement of the NBC schedule, I now understand and agree with Bob [Greenblatt, NBC executive] that it doesn’t necessarily fit particularly well with their schedule. As well-crafted and contemporized as it was, it was a big and radical shift for viewers to embrace this new idea — and that may, to some degree, have had to do with why it didn’t make it."
If you didn't get the chance to read the leaked script for the Wonder Woman pilot, then you may have caught Tanit Phoenix's Youtube audition video, in which she reads directly from said script. If not, give it a look. Based on this, you might notice that the characterization of Wonder Woman in David E. Kelley's pilot- a corporate executive by day, super-heroine by night (who is self-aware of her celebrity status) is a far cry from the Princess of Themyscira we see in the comics. That's not to say the idea couldn't work, but I have to wonder (no pun intended!) if they had stuck to the subject material in the comics, would we be watching a Wonder Woman television series on NBC this fall? Was The Cape so awful that it scared NBC executives from taking a chance on another superhero TV show?
Just because NBC turned down this gem doesn't mean that Wonder Woman won't find a home on a different network, something Roth could neither confirm nor deny at the time of the interview. A Wonder Woman television series can work; all it needs is a few comics-savvy producers and writers who can breathe new life into this classic character. Oh, and maybe tell the costume department to lay off the shiny latex. I think we can all agree it was not a good look.
