On December 10th, 2020, the entire internet stood still as the Disney Investor’s Day meeting livestream aired. For three straight hours, the Mouse announced nearly every upcoming project from their long list of IPs, franchises, and brands in an inescapable, rapid-fire succession. If you scrolled the twitter timeline for one minute, there was bound to be at least three different spin-off shows posted on the corporate Disney+ twitter account, everything in-between a limited Moon Knight series, Lando, and Cars. Some fans rejoiced, some fans celebrated their personal investments, and others sat in the noise pollution of reboots, spin-offs, and revivals.The Mandalorian, one of Disney+’s first forays into live-action tv content, came to a second season close a week later, teasing more spin-off projects and cliffhanger endings, and CG Luke Skywalker spectacle. The future of nostalgia-fueled spectacle and franchise oversaturation was creeping up the pipeline, but never before had it felt this grim.
Enter WandaVision, not the first Marvel series, nor even the first MCU series, but the first Marvel Studios series. The same Marvel Studios who released Avengers: Endgame almost two years ago; finally creating original, serialized TV that will star the characters from the movies and have a huge impact on the course of the Marvel Cinematic Universe going forward. It’s a weighty promise, which makes it all the more surprising that the once initially planned second, more ambitious series after The Falcon and the Winter Soldier was instead shifted to be the debut – the series initial premiere feeling stripped back and grounded in comparison to the long-term goals of the Marvel Disney+ offerings.
WandaVision follows the story of Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen), a long-time side character in the Avengers ensemble, introduced in 2015 with Age of Ultron, along with her vibranium synthezoid boyfriend, Vision (Paul Bettany). Coping with the loss of Vision in Endgame, Wanda retreats to the New Jersey town of Westview, and creates a false reality in which her and Vision can live together in a sitcom-inspired fantasy world – complete with opening title sequences and laugh tracks. Meanwhile, Monica Rambeau (Teyonah Parris), daughter of Maria Rambeau from Captain Marvel, and familiar MCU faces, Darcy Lewis (Kat Dennings) and Jimmy Woo (Randall Park), attempt to try to get to the bottom of Wanda’s “hex”, and reach out to her before matters get worse.
The concept of the show is an alluring hook in itself; let’s make use of the limited series format on Disney+ and choose to linger a little longer on a character that felt underwritten in previous movies. Not only that, but it lets us fully unpack the pain and hardship she faced in the background noise of the world collapsing on itself in these big, blockbuster team-up films. And for a while, it actually works. The introductory episodes of WandaVision are striking, and stand to be of the most interesting works of the MCU thus far. Fully committing to the proverbial “bit”, episodes one through three throw us head first into Wanda’s escapist fantasy, and it is all the better for it. As the show acquaints itself, the framing device feels ingenious. We may be watching a sitcom; with visual homages to The Dick Van Dyke Show and zany A and B plots following the superheroes in disguise adjusting to their new married, humdrum life — but each episode of ’the show within a show’ subtly digs deeper into Wanda’s psyche and desires. Her new American accent, singing a Sokovian lullaby to calm down her twin boys in a suburban home, the neighborly community of Westview; Wandavision is at its most successful when it is showing us exactly the life Wanda longs for with a surprising amount of depth and internality.
It is a shame, then, that once the series reaches its fourth episode, that spark quickly fizzles out. Previous episodes may have alluded to the world outside Wanda’s reality through clever breaks in aspect ratio, filmic style, and storytelling devices, but episode four completely interrupts the show’s rhythm to introduce the S.W.O.R.D. crew and their drive to reach out to Wanda. It was obvious that this was coming eventually, but one would have hoped that the transition would be cleaner and narratively motivated. Instead, episode four serves as a display of all of Marvel’s worst storytelling habits: Darcy and Jimmy serving as our audience surrogates to react in Whedonspeak to large stretches of exposition, retroactively erasing any sense of mystery or subtlety built up in the previous three episodes. It, in many ways, represents the lowest point of the series, and WandaVision only struggles to recover from its patronizing view of the audience (though it should be noted, episode four is somehow the highest rated episode of WandaVision on IMDB).
The series tries to return us to Wanda’s reality in episodes four through seven to explore the aesthetics of sitcoms in the 80s and beyond, but it becomes transparent from the uneven runtimes and S.W.O.R.D. interludes that the meta character study the show once was is no more. Whilst the visual identity of sitcoms’ past remain mostly intact, gone are the zany A and B plots, character moments, and crystal clear motivation driving the show are few and far in between. The show also develops an unhealthy habit of cliffhanger episode stingers that feel cynically manufactured to generate week-to-week speculation on the “mystery box”, which the show simply cannot sustain itself on, especially after its anti-climactic finale. While WandaVision certainly does not owe fans validation in any regard, after ceaselessly teasing larger threads episode to episode, and cast and crew enabling these expectations, it’s at the very least questionable why these echo chambers ended up drowning out the character work the show was once so set out to explore; pushing full throttle to wrap up the protagonists growth at the last minute. In her own solo show, Wanda Maximoff feels like she falls to the wayside.
And while cliffhanger endings and hype machines are tried and true long running TV traditions, yes, WandaVision’s ultimate flaw that makes these attempts feel studio sanctioned and half-hearted is ultimately at the root of its very own construction. The last episode being entirely composed of Marvel movie third-act clichés made it all the more obvious that WandaVision is not written like a TV show. When I learned that lead writer Jac Schaffer had no previous credits in TV, but rather feature film, it all clicked together why the midpoint of the show feels like an extended, meandering second act. Or, why no episode past the third has any contained arcs or growth to follow. Or, why the runtimes of each episode are so inconsistent. Or, why the ending stingers feel unearned, and strangely abrupt. WandaVision is not written as a TV series, but rather, a lengthy film that was chopped into nine parts.
This is a format that has been done before, with Netflix’s Stranger Things and other binge-offered limited series, but WandaVision is released on a weekly basis and seems to be designed for the opposite. I don’t want to argue there’s anything inherently wrong with the weekly episodic model — in fact, I actively prefer it, like many of WandaVision’s vocally online defenders. But something about the delivery of skeletal story beats uploaded weekly on Disney+’s monthly subscription based streaming service, each cliffhanger creating cheap shock instead of whimsy, just feels unfortunately bleak. Instead, it’s framed as Disney “keeping the tradition of television alive”, a counter to any minuscule criticism of WandaVision’s flaws or motives.
Despite its title, WandaVision expresses little interest in fully realizing Wanda into the strong character she has the potential to become, nor does it have any desire to be television on more than a superficial level. It is sad that such an honest attempt at telling a story about moving on from grief is sidelined by cheap cliffhanger thrills, magic beams, and military tanks. WandaVision’s and The Mandalorian Season Two’s spin-off teases and promises of fulfillment in “the next one” are glimpses into what television will become under the Disney monopoly, and the pit in my stomach that I felt watching my social media feed explode with the Investor’s Day announcements has not gone away. With The Falcon and the Winter Soldier premiere two weeks away, there’s almost no end to this consumer cycle in sight.
