Streaming Marvel: WandaVision Started a New Chapter In Superhero TV Shows
(Photo: Courtesy of Disney+)
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: Marvel’s second-stringers pick up the pieces left behind by Captain America in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier.
If you are going to spin out hundreds of hours of content around the same “universe” or “continuity” or “IP”—whether or not this is a good thing for art or humanity—the least you can do is get weird with it from time to time. With Disney taking the reins of Marvel Studios and then deciding it was going to launch its own streaming service, suddenly Netflix’s perfectly serviceable stable of Marvel shows was just not good enough. Rather than focus on street-level character studies, Disney’s original diktat was that everything should fit into its increasingly bonkers, multiversal mess of continuity. When WandaVision was announced, my first thought was “Oh… the side characters nobody really cares about? Great.”
But, as generative-AI prompt-writers are slowly coming to learn the hard way, an idea is less than half the assignment. It’s the work you put into it, the details you shape, that determine whether a work succeeds or fails. It helps if the folks involved care and take pride in their work! WandaVision completely succeeds as another Marvel franchise-building exercise, giving a spotlight to the second-fiddle characters (and also the actors who are better than those roles had thus far ever called for). With the usual caveat that you need to have seen four or five movies leading up to it, the story also mostly works standing on its own. And perhaps more so than almost anything Marvel has produced for streaming TV since, it’s actually even more fun on rewatches.
The Show
Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen) and Vision (Paul Bettany) are a young couple starring in a black-and-white 1950s sitcom. In perfect accordance with the form, this means situations with low-stakes comedy-of-errors, everything wrapped up in a neat bow by the end. I cannot stress how charming the show’s first episode comes off: Wanda’s reality-bending powers manifest as ’50s-style camera tricks with painted-on-the-film sparkles whenever something appears or disappears, and any levitation is transparently achieved through objects dangling around on strings.
Olsen (sister to Mary-Kate and Ashley, themselves the poster children of the ’80s sitcom) is completely committed to her post-war sitcom wife role. She is delivering her lines to a studio audience with the enunciation and projection of somebody who grew up hearing newsreels by buttoned-up men speaking in the Mid-Atlantic accent. It is so wonderful when Marvel gives its actors something to do!
Each subsequent episode changes the sitcom backdrop—to the ’60s, the ’70s, the ’80s, the ’90s and ‘00s—as both the camera work and the situations become messier and more human than the fictional format has really been designed to accommodate. Through it all, something is dreadfully off—both for us watching along at home and the characters in the show. We, the audience, know that Wanda and Vision live in the here and now, and that the last we saw of Vision was his death at the hands of Thanos during the events of Avengers: Infinity War. The era-appropriate commercials that play between segments grow increasingly sinister. The bit players keep breaking character. When truly wild or incongruous things manifest, Wanda just rewinds reality itself to elide them.
The reveal is not earth-shattering, but it is well considered. Faced with the death of the man she loved, with being denied a happy ending after a lifetime where she survived a war-torn country and was then cruelly used for evil ends by Nazi mad scientists, Wanda has entered a state of denial. Camping out on the lot that Vision bought for them in Westview, New Jersey, she uses her reality-warping powers to create a zone of pure fantasy designed around her last comforting memory: Ripped DVDs of old-timey American sitcoms that she used to watch with the family that was bombed and the brother who was later killed during the events of Avengers: Age of Ultron. Every citizen of Westview has been pressed into service as one of Wanda’s secondary characters and background extras, their brains rewritten with sitcom drivel.
This is amazing, particularly when taken in context with all the other stuff Marvel has done. It is almost more of an outright argument against superheroes than any random episode of Invincible. There is zero question that Wanda is the unambiguous bad guy here, and that she must be stopped. As the episodes proceed, Vision comes to question his existence and to chafe under Wanda’s dominance. Wanda gets pregnant and has twins who proceed to grow up at an insane rate. As the competing directives of “be a good parent” and “keep cognitively domineering a helpless population of uninvolved innocents” become more and more at odds with each other, the sitcom format continues to evolve to emulate warts-and-all kinds of latter-day sitcoms like Malcolm in the Middle and Modern Family. It’s writing, performance, and production design that fires on all cylinders.
Eventually, though, the real world has to intrude. By about halfway through the show’s short 9-episode run, we learn that the situation in Westview has numerous government entities all on high alert. Assigned to investigate the anomaly that has swallowed an entire town is Monica Rambeau (Teyonah Parris), who True Believers will remember as the daughter of Maria Rambeau from Captain Marvel. Monica is all grown up now, but was a victim of Thanos’ snap (meaning she has been absent from the world for the past five years and only now has reappeared). Her rapturing at Thanos’ hands has been particularly cruel. During that absence, her mother died of cancer. Monica returns to her desk at S.W.O.R.D., another agency that, like S.H.I.E.L.D., is really committed to its acronym.