Riri Williams/Ironheart isn’t a time traveler in either her comics or TV show incarnations. However, the Disney+ miniseries Ironheart (starring Dominique Thorne as the titular superhero) still registers as a visitor from a bygone era. Filmed back in 2022, Ironheart constantly reminds viewers of COVID-shoot restrictions and pre-2021 Marvel Cinematic Universe properties. Most critically, Ironheart was conceived and filmed before Marvel overhauled its approach to small-screen programming. Turns out, eschewing showrunners and making TV shows emulating six-hour movies was not a recipe for success.
As the modern television landscape embraces more old-school programming like The Pitt and Poker Face, Ironheart’s yawn-worthy story structure is an unwelcome visitor from the Ghost of Television’s Past. This offshoot of a Black Panther: Wakanda Forever supporting character (first created in the comics in 2016 by Brian Michael Bendis and Mike Deodato*) simply reminds viewers why so many of the initial Marvel Studios Disney+ shows turned into small-screen boondoggles on par with The Jay Leno Show and Father of the Pride.
As Ironheart begins, Williams has been tossed out of MIT. She and her special iron suit (modeled after Iron Man’s mechanical outfits) return to Chicago, where Williams was born and raised. However, striving for greatness and personal tragedies have made it impossible for Williams to return to her mom Ronnie (Anji White) and best friend/neighbor Xavier Washington (Matthew Elam). The day Riri returns home, she and Washington take a stroll next to a beach that introduces one of Ironheart's greatest flaws: sparseness. Why are these two the only people on the beach? Why is this the most vacant version of Chicago ever in pop culture?
It’s hard to discern if this is an issue stemming from budgetary issues or COVID-shooting constrictions. However this manifested, this “tender” reunion scene looks distractingly sparse. How on Earth did the “Baby Merchant” Cop Rock musical number, with its clearly visible background extras or a jogger trotting briefly in the foreground, exude a more tangible larger world than this costly 2025 Marvel Television production?
After that eerily empty digression, Ironheart’s central source of conflict comes into play. Riri needs money to achieve her technological dreams. To procure those funds, Riri turns to Parker Robbins/The Hood (Anthony Ramos). He leads a group of motley outcasts, including hacker Slug (Shea Couleé) and fighter John (Manny Montana), who pull off heists taking money from the uber-wealthy. Riri and her armored suit are a welcome part of the team. However, it quickly becomes apparent that Robbins is a shady guy. All the mystical powers of that hood he’s always wearing (hence his “The Hood” moniker) are taking him and Riri into increasingly precarious territory.
If Ironheart were a standard broadcast TV show, each episode would involve Riri fighting a new D-list Marvel Comics villain while sharing fun, increasingly lived-in banter with her friends. Sadly, Ironheart comes to audiences as a 2020s genre miniseries on Disney+. That means writers like Chinaka Hodge and Cristian Martinez are straining to sustain one movie-sized plot over six episodes rather than leaning into unique storytelling advantages exclusive to television. As a result, The Hood is the only overarching adversary for all five-ish hours of programming. Innately repetitive storytelling quickly becomes apparent, especially in how three of the first four episodes have the same cliffhanger revolving around how Robbins is ACTUALLY pretty evil.
Variety in Ironheart only manifests through title cards. Otherwise, this show struggles creating satisfying episodic narratives or characters who really capture your heart. It’s also an incredibly drab program under the eyes of directors Sam Bailey and Angela Barnes and cinematographers Ante Cheng and Alison Kelly. I can’t emphasize enough how the lack of crowds or extras in this show really diminishes its impact, especially since I don’t remember this being a problem in other MCU TV shows shot in the throes of COVID like Moon Knight and Ms. Marvel.
Even beyond that, though, the various environments aren’t compelling to look at. A hideout for The Hood and his cronies, for instance, lacks any sort of personality. Speaking of The Hood, there’s never a moment in this show where Parker Robbins looks “cool” or intimidating wearing that stupid-looking hood. Whether it’s the texture of the actual hood prop, the lenses used on the camera, or the lighting on Ironheart’s set, the character looks like the wrong kind of silly. Rather than evoking a grandiose comic book legend leaping off the page, he looks like a rejected Arrow villain.
Most frustrating of all these characters is, unfortunately, Riri Williams herself. Williams is a morally complex character, keeping people at bay as she grapples with long-term trauma over losing her best friend Natalie Washington (Lyric Ross) plus her Tony Stark-obsessed stepdad. It’s conceptually commendable that the various Ironheart scripts pull no punches in depicting the flawed and vulnerable sides of this character, including her recurring panic attacks. Unfortunately, the surface-level writing doesn’t lend her psychological foibles much weight. Williams is all expository dialogue about angst. However, those problems don’t materialize in visually or thematically interesting ways.
She also doesn’t have much of a life beyond tinkering with her iron suit or growing paranoid about working with criminals. The only glimpse we get into what makes her tick is her shared affection for Alanis Morissette tunes with supporting Ironheart player Joe McGillicuddy (Alden Ehrenreich). There’s also the strange subplot involving Riri’s equivalent to JARVIS, an A.I. replication of Natalie. Save for some fourth-episode dialogue from Washington, the darker implications of non-consensual digital resurrections aren’t really probed here.
It’s yet another lofty thematic concept related Riri that Ironheart's scripts can't handle. After all, the writing is too busy dropping White Castle product placement and lines like “that could be us, but you’re tripping.” Speaking of undercooked Ironheart details, sociopolitical material related to The Hood and his fellow thieves, who look out for "the little guy" in taking on CEOs, is dismally written. For starters, Ironheart is too wary to evoke actual terms and specifics of American class consciousness. That leaves sequences about taking on "the man" emotionally weightless. More egregiously, this subplot eventually gets dropped once the final Ironheart episode rolls around so that the show can delve fully into MCU magic gobbledy-gook. It's all so poorly realized, robbing Ironheart of opportunities to underscore its story with righteous verve.
Despite the show running for six episodes, Ironheart fails to flesh out either its titular lead (poor Dominique Thorne has nothing to work with) or political commentary. Brimming with a bit more personality are lively hacker Slug (Shea Couleé) and the enjoyably lived-in mother/daughter rapport duo Madeleine (Cree Summer) and Heather (Tanya Christiansen). "Thankfully", those characters are either largely or entirely absent from Ironheart's finale so that the script can heavily focus on white men and eye-roll worthy set-ups for future MCU properties. How fitting that a show so half-baked would fizzle into a deluge of cliffhangers and supporting characters shouting at Riri, “you and I are NOT finished yet.”
Viewers, meanwhile, will be finished before Ironheart’s second episode is done. Very quickly, it becomes apparent that the now infamous flaws of typical Marvel/Disney+ TV show have once again reared their ugly heads. To rub salt into the wounds, Ironheart features deeply specific transgressions, like wasting the distinctive visual and storytelling possibilities of setting a superhero show in Chicago. There are also frustratingly few fun armor-based action sequences over six episodes, a microcosm of just how much has gone wrong with Ironheart. Even the most basic thrills of superhero media are in short supply in this endeavor that’s more tedious than exhilarating.