Streaming Marvel: Agent Carter Was an Earnest Attempt at Genre Fiction

By Kenneth Lowe  |  September 26, 2025 | 11:00am
TV Features Disney Plus
Streaming Marvel: Agent Carter Was an Earnest Attempt at Genre Fiction

The Marvel Cinematic Universe rolls ever onward, whether the average viewer can possibly watch all of it or not. And now, the small screen has become the place to watch the bulk of MCU storytelling. Can’t keep it all straight? Ken Lowe is revisiting every MCU TV show—the good, the bad and the non-canon—in our ongoing feature, Streaming Marvel. You can follow along with the whole series here. This month: One of Marvel’s most consistently bonkers television offerings: Agent Carter

One major (and completely warranted) criticism of the Marvel canon on screens both silver and small is that its stories all feel the same. There is a Marvel oeuvre, with its own predictable beats and peccadillos—whether it’s a film about a Norse thunder god or the king of a hidden Afrofuturist utopia, there are times you can forget which damn movie or TV show you are watching. This is one reason I think that, like me, so many responded with such enthusiasm to WandaVision—it felt like a completely distinct departure, yes, but it was firmly rooted in the genre conventions of the sitcom for the purposes of sending it up.

There’s an upside to your audiences knowing what they’re going to get, certainly. But at its base, superhero fiction is rooted in other genres, and it would be nice, occasionally, to see those genres reflected in the popular movies and shows based on superheroes. This was also why Captain America: The First Avenger was such a good movie. It was about super-heroics, yes, but it was also a straight-up World War II-era period piece about stomping Nazi ass, unafraid to cast its main character as a Colt-and-Tommygun-wielding commando. It’s perhaps fitting, then, that one of Marvel’s most distinct television shows (at least from a genre identity standpoint) was Agent Carter, focusing on Captain America’s best and most memorable supporting character.

Across two seasons, Agent Carter subscribed to a winning formula: Dress Hayley Atwell in the very sharpest mid-century business-wear (accessories generally included a snappy hat and/or a shotgun), and have her engage in some down and dirty Cold War-era spycraft with a mad science twist. It didn’t last, and it’s a shame it didn’t.

The Show

It’s right after WWII in New York City, and Peggy Carter (Atwell) is an agent of the Strategic Scientific Reserve, the cops who investigate crazy Soviet mad science incidents. Carter is the agency’s most competent and least respected member, on account of her gender and it being 1946. (In light of the Mad Men-era misogyny on display, it’s a little strange that the front for the SSR’s top secret HQ is a phone company that is seemingly tooled toward making it easy for Peggy specifically to put a harmless job title on her CV. It’s a nod to one of the professions that employed a lot of women back then.)

Peggy is largely treated like an office helper by her gruff superiors. The cast at the SSR is rounded out by two agents: Chad Michael Murray’s Jack Thompson (the rival and bully), and Enver Gjokaj’s Daniel Sousa (a war amputee, a soft boy, and Peggy’s sometime love interest). The show’s whimsical award-winner, though, is James D’Arcy as Jarvis, butler to Howard Stark (that’s Iron Man’s dad… and the name of Tony Stark’s A.I. that got turned into Vision!). D’Arcy and Atwell read as the two no-nonsense Brits surrounded by lunkheaded Yanks, and their adversarial repartee is about two-thirds of why the show works as well as it does. Of course, Dominic Cooper shows up to reprise his role as the elder Stark, complete with a game Mid-Atlantic accent. He’s another perfect foil for Atwell to play off of, and together the two ground the show in its period aesthetic.

It’s an aesthetic the show clearly delights in. Season 1 has Peggy chasing down a Stark superweapon that’s gone missing, all while covertly running a counter-op against her own pigheaded agency, which is convinced Stark must be colluding with the Russians. Throughout, Peggy is subjected to a constant Captain America radio drama, which happens to feature a fictionalized version of herself as a weightless damsel in distress. In one scene, Carter has tracked down a conspirator to his home address, and their fisticuffs play out in juxtaposition to the radio drama’s fight scene. The show gives us a glimpse of the folks in the radio sound booth, and the lobster shells and meat cutlets they’re cracking and smacking to produce their beat-down sound effects, all while the real Peggy is doing the real thing. It’s nearly as layered a scene as Bruce Wayne drunkenly banishing his house guests in Batman Begins, and about as fun to watch.

By the end of Season 1, Peggy has gotten to the bottom of a conspiracy involving a Soviet charm school, parachuted into Eastern Europe to spray machine gun fire alongside the Howling Commandos, and saved New York from getting carpet-bombed with an evil science McGuffin by a mind-controlled Howard Stark. She does it with a combination of investigative chops, clever disguises, tricky spy gadgets, and occasionally just knucklin’ up.

Season 2 skips ahead a year and sends Peggy out to Hollywood to investigate a murder with a wrinkle: The victim is frozen in a block of ice in the middle of a Southern California summer. (Readers of Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle will recognize the conceit of an icy substance that freezes over whatever it touches.) That in turn leads her to a conspiracy involving unwitting scientist Jason Wilkes (Reggie Austin, who navigates ’40s racism by trying to be a harmless nice guy), an FBI muckety muck played by Kurtwood Smith, and secretly evil Hollywood actress Whitney Frost (Wynn Everett). They’re all after some creepy black substance from another dimension that turns you evil and eats everything—this is bad, so the season concludes with Peggy and the gang exploding it into another dimension.

Agent Carter sadly ends on something of a cliffhanger. Peggy and Sousa finally kiss already, which is great, but Agent Thompson (fresh off what might have been a face turn for the guy) catches a bullet from someone who relieves his corpse of the kompromat he had on Peggy. It was setting up something intriguing, but, unfortunately, viewership flagged and ABC cancelled the show.

The Shenanigans

Marvel has made much of its lady-led projects, quite unsubtly. And there are a lot of female characters who are pretty cool! But it feels like, for whatever reason, Marvel left behind its earliest leading ladies and is only recently trying to incorporate them. Scarlett Johansson was in one of the first Marvel movies, her Black Widow character a major part of setting up the connective tissue that established their whole “cinematic universe,” yet she only got a Black Widow movie in 2021, eleven years after her debut, and after her character had already super-no-take-backsies died in the series chronology. Natalie Portman—a generational talent—was underutilized and sidelined after anchoring Thor, wasn’t even present for Thor: Ragnarok, and only came back in Thor: Love and Thunder.

Atwell fares somewhat better with Agent Carter, while it lasted, but after that, she’s mainly shown up in subsequent Captain America movies to provide some pathos to Chris Evans’ square-jawed paragon of civic responsibility. People are starving for this actor to kick ass in stuff: They brought Atwell back into the voice booth for a What If…? episode and also made her a super soldier in Doctor Strange In the Multiverse of Madness (only to have her get stomped by the Scarlet Witch. Boo!). Agent Carter’s abbreviated run, ending on a tease that never resolves, feels like another snub—the suits not respecting a lady’s chops, despite her doing everything Cap can do, in heels.

What’s Next

For more workplace drama with a touch of the paranormal, you can check out the longer-running Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., which we’ve already visited. If you’re following along in release order, Captain America: Civil War comes out right around the time Agent Carter ends, and features Peggy’s death. For more of Atwell doing what she does best, Marvel’s What If…? features several episodes with Peggy in a starring role. And of course, for the scene that ties it all back together, skip to the end of Avengers: Endgame for the last reveal before the credits roll. It’s been a long, long time.

Tier Ranking

This one is too much fun across its short runtime—Atwell and D’Arcy are pitch-perfect, and the action in any given episode is just as likely to come from Atwell shifting flawlessly into an American accent to butter up an unsuspecting goon as it is to come in the form of bullets and bombs. At a relatively breezy 18 episodes dripping with the post-war period glamor you crave, this one sashays into the S-tier with a gun hidden in its garter.

Next month, Streaming Marvel returns with a perfect spooky season rewatch for October: Agatha All Along.

Kenneth Lowe is a regular contributor to Paste TV. You can follow him on Bluesky @illusiveken.bsky.social. To support his fiction, join his Patreon.

 
Join the discussion...