Streaming Marvel: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. was Marvel’s Wildest Cul-de-Sac

By Kenneth Lowe  |  August 18, 2025 | 11:00am
TV Features streaming marvel
Streaming Marvel: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. was Marvel’s Wildest Cul-de-Sac

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: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.

One of the greatest strengths of comic book storytelling is that it’s an ongoing and ever-evolving narrative, one whose path not even the creators are always entirely sure of. On the other hand, one of the greatest weaknesses of comic book storytelling is that it’s an ongoing and ever-evolving narrative… one whose path not even the creators are always entirely sure of.

There are a lot of reasons Marvel made a splash when it returned to the superhero cinema space after letting other companies play with its biggest titles. I argue one of the most important pieces of their success was that Marvel took some of its less-well-known heroes and made them more accessible for your average moviegoer. “Here’s why you should care about Iron Man!” “This is Captain America’s whole deal!” “Wouldn’t it be fun to pal around with Thor?” A big part of that accessibility was that these individual heroes were unburdened by the utterly impenetrable continuity that so often plagues comic book narratives in their original medium. It’s why Marvel’s own Ultimate titles were something I snapped up 20 years ago: It was great to just read some X-Men adventures! What a thrill, to see Cyclops being lame without having to know all about his family tree!

But, the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s sense of freedom has since been burdened with this exact same kind of baggage that plagues its comics counterparts. I feel as if, without our permission, this has slowly crept up on us until we suddenly find ourselves needing to remember which version of Loki is the one currently having time travel adventures, or what the status of Spider-Man is vis-à-vis which of his relatives and villains are alive, dead, or have no memory of him.

Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. debuted in 2013, right after The Avengers—Marvel’s triumphant proof-of-concept. It was Marvel’s signal to the world that they were coming after every entertainment medium. With the promise of more stories for the (supposedly dead) Agent Coulson the wiggle room that a weekly show format can give to longform storytellers, and an association with Joss Whedon (still regarded at the time as television’s spurned genius), AoS seemed like the perfect idea.

The Show

AoS debuted in the immediate aftermath of The Avengers, promising the occasional cameo from MCU players as the show tackled smaller-scale, serialized (and decidedly more television-budget-friendly) threats to humanity from the perspective of the non-superpowered agents of the shadowy organization known as the Strategic Homeland Intervention Enforcement and Logistics Division. (“Someone really wanted our initials to spell out ‘shield.’”)

True believers will recall that Agent Phil Coulson (Clark Gregg), the bone-dry wit in a suit who showed up as the unassuming connective tissue throughout all of Marvel’s “Phase One” movies, died of a severe case of “being written by Joss Whedon” at the end of The Avengers. (Gregg’s cuteness was characterized by Paste’s Amy Glynn as “indecent.”) AoS takes the somewhat novel approach of making Gregg’s background character one of the focuses of the show—along with the mystery of how the hell he and his nice-guy smile are walking around after getting stabbed by Loki.

Of course, that’s just one agent. The show’s long service award winners include Ming-Na Wen’s pilot-with-a-past Melinda May, Brett Dalton as Grant Ward (whose affiliations, deaths, and resurrections could fill out a whole wiki), Chloe Bennett’s Skye (whose early season appearances I cannot describe better than Paste’s Amy Glynn did, when she called her a “Whedon-Rorschach-Blot-Asskicking-Brunette”). Iain de Caestecker and Elizabeth Henstridge play the thematically named lab rats Fitz and Simmons.

AoS was in some ways an absolutely riveting companion to the MCU’s cinema offerings, if for no other reason than devotees felt they had to tune in to find out how the show could possibly reconcile some of the groundbreaking events happening in the movies with the week-to-week drama of the show. This was a prominent angle of the series’ first season, when showrunners managed the feat of timing release windows to the major reveal in Captain America: The Winter Soldier that S.H.I.E.L.D. had actually been wholly taken over by the insidious Mad Science Nazi organization HYDRA, the fallout of which played out in viewers’ living rooms.

Subsequent seasons also attempted to dovetail the show’s plots with Marvel’s plans for its larger narrative projects, including its Inhumans storyline (a bust on the silver screen), and the Sokovia Accords that led to all the drama in Captain America: Civil War. Over the course of the show, S.H.I.E.L.D.’s directorship is bounced between (by my count) three pairs of hands, characters switch allegiances (back and forth!), die and are resurrected, and in general get up to hijinks that, were they to have occurred on the silver screen, would have upended everything—time travel! Alien invasions! Robot copies of people! Freakin’ Ghost Rider!! All of it is anchored by the very Whedonesque core of characters you like having character moments you care about.

The Shenanigans

AoS somehow managed the twists and turns of the MCU’s mercurial narrative choices with something like aplomb. It did so well, in fact, that even though Season 5 ended with a clear sendoff to Clark Gregg’s Coulson and the overwhelming implication that the show was over, it got renewed for two more seasons anyway. It’s kind of a mess: Gregg returns as… a duplicate of Coulson… possessed by an alien entity… named “Sarge?” Yet, critics largely agree the show remained relatively strong—Paste loved it for all the reasons so many others did: Great emotional beats from a dedicated ensemble anchored by Gregg.

Of course, no look back at the show can be complete without reckoning with Joss Whedon, and the allegations against him that started surfacing in 2017, when the show was well underway. Whedon, in case you missed the memo, was alleged by his ex-wife and multiple coworkers to have exhibited a pattern of inappropriate, abusive, and deceptive behavior, all while publicly espousing values totally at odds with who he was on set. It set off a wave of reappraisals of his works, particularly in terms of how they treat women in their narratives.

Whedon was less responsible for AoS’ particulars than showrunner Maurissa Tancharoen (who is also married to Whedon’s brother Jed). Still, so much of the show’s feel and its foundation in Whedon’s Avengers are what were responsible for such buzz among a major portion of the fanbase. The cancellation of AoS signalled a lot of things about the MCU, but one of the biggest was a kind of end of Whedon’s influence—even symbolically—over the whole affair.

What was that influence? It goes deeper than quippy, lampshade-hanging one-liners spouted by tight ensembles. For a particular kind of fan, Whedon’s triumphant orchestration of The Avengers was seen as a kind of vindication of The Fandom, as opposed to The Money Men—those ancient and risk-averse studio execs whom the fans will never give any credit. Joss Whedon—whose shows were known for making somewhat braver narrative choices and then getting unceremoniously cancelled—epitomized the resentments of a lot of crabby fan-boys. If only those suits would just shut up and let the people who love the source material go to work, we’d be bathing in great TV and they’d be rollin’ in dough, the thinking went. And with The Avengers, those folks felt like they’d just been proven right.

And yet. I ask you: Seven seasons of television later, why did Coulson never see the Avengers again? It is the ridiculous, head-scratching question that anybody who has not seen the show will immediately ask, and which it feels like fans can’t answer. He was just never important enough to bring back to conclude the emotional arc set up in The Avengers waaaay back in 2012.

Everything had moved on by then, anyway. When AoS went off the air in 2020, the Avengers were “post-snap,” and Disney+ was set to kick off its suite of shows (like WandaVision), all intended to assert its streaming dominance and its ownership over the franchise. In that regard, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. truly stands as the end of an era right in the middle of this ongoing project that is the MCU.

What’s Next

If you’re trudging through the Marvel shows in release order, AoS is truly the end of the pre-Disney+ offerings, and you’re ready to check out WandaVision, Falcon and the Winter Soldier, and Loki. Next up in theaters, you’ve got another perplexing cul-de-sac in The Eternals, a movie whose existence the broader MCU seems unwilling to acknowledge.

Tier Ranking

No other MCU show is packing this many minutes of airtime, a feat in itself. In deference to the truth that all long-running shows are going to be uneven, and for giving Clark Gregg his time in the sun, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. miraculously awakens in the A-Tier, with no memory of whatever unpleasant physical trauma may or may not have come before.

Next month, Streaming Marvel dives into the MCU’s period piece and another well-deserved showcase for a secondary character, Agent Carter.

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.

 
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