Today we heard from ABC about the future of the Marvel Universe on TV: Agents of SHIELD has been renewed, and Agent Carter has been picked up. With a series of film franchises already dominating the box-office, Marvel has in the past year moved to television and announced plans for original Netflix programs. The ever-expanding universe of Marvel Entertainment continues to spread is multi-platform wings. But about those TV shows.
The first 12 or 13 episodes of Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD were mediocre. I had planned to do write-ups for the show here, but frankly, it started out in that worst of categories for writing material: boring. Given all the potential involved in telling the human level stories of the superhero world, somehow this show managed to find the most boring ones. I kept watching (probably for the same reason as Jill Pantozzi at The Mary Sue: “If this wasn’t a “Marvel” show I would have stopped watching ages ago”). But then in recent weeks, Agents of SHIELD turned into a pretty good show. Compared to much of what airs on network (especially on ABC), Agents of SHIELD is worthy of another season.
More exciting news comes from the pick-up of a new Marvel series, Agent Carter. You might remember Peggy Carter (Hayley Atwell) from Captain America and its sequel, where she was a total badass and one-time love interest of Steve Rogers during the World War 2 years. Now she will get her own show, set in 1946, which will follow Carter’s work for the Strategic Scientific Reserve as she runs secret missions for Howard Stark and mourns her lost beau, Cap.
Agent Carter is the first dedicated female title of the new Marvel Universe, and bringing her story to television is promising. Providing her the long-form option could also be helpful to the struggling Agents of SHIELD. The possibility for intersection in these shows is really quite exciting. (SPOILERS AHEAD).
SHIELD, we recently discovered, has been over run by the villainous group Hydra, which had spent 70 years infiltrating SHIELD, going all the way back to the origins of the organization. Those origins will surely feature in Agent Carter. Overlapping the story of SHIELD’s fight against Hydra in SHIELD with Hydra’s infiltration of SHIELD in the ’40s is an intriguing prospect.
That both series will also provide fodder for tie-ins and cross-promotions for ABC and Disney, as Marvel’s cinematic franchises continue booming their way through the box-office, surely doesn’t hurt, either. And in the end, the news is a reminder that when it comes to Marvel Entertainment, the universe they’re creating on America’s screens is more interesting than the stories they’re telling in that universe.
