Adrianne Palicki’s casting boosts Wonder Woman

The blogs have been all a-Twitter for the past 24 hours about the news of former Friday Night Lights siren Adrianne Palicki. She’s been tapped to play the titular role in the Wonder Woman pilot NBC recently passed on, and then picked up at the last second. I have never been so excited that Lone Star crashed and burned as spectacularly as it did (and I never waste an opportunity to take a chance to say I told you so), giving her a chance to move on to a project like this. But can the Palicki play a role as iconic as our favorite Amazonian princess? You bet your Invisible Airplane she can.

I often say anyone was an idiot not to have watched FNL. However, I recognize that most people did not, and I just have to get over that little factoid. However, those of us that did know that her turn as Tyra Collete was pretty damn impressive. In three seasons, she turned a cliché into a powerhouse. As much as people knock the murder storyline, at the least it was a coming out party for Palicki and Jesse Plemmons.

Palicki will have no trouble playing Wonder Woman. And Diana Themyscira. And … apparently Diana Prince (that’s right, three identities). Therein lies the problem: What kind of show did she just get herself into? While I have not had a chance to read the pilot script myself yet, many people have, and by all reports it is bad … really bad. Like, My Mother the Car bad. You can apparently understand why NBC passed on it originally. So the question really is why did NBC change their mind? One thought, obviously, is this piece of casting was in the pipeline.

As a fan, I hope the ship gets righted before the pilot goes to shoot. I have read pilot scripts that are unrecognizable compared to their aired version. One hopes that will be the case here. I have some faith that it does, even if David E. Kelley is involved. Do I have faith? Well, I have stopped believing that good television will win out over bad television long ago; but casting decisions like this tend to give one a little hope.

I’m hopeful that a by-product of all of the Palicki buzz is that the Red Dawn remake, long completed, but unreleased due to MGM’s funding “challenges,” might finally see the light of day. But, as you can see in this post, all I have is hope. And, well, Adrianne Palicki.

Clacked by Ivey West
on Feb 17, 2011 @ 23:03 EST5EDT