October 12th, 2013
I like the idea of Agents of SHIELD. I might be the easiest sell in America for the pitch that goes, “It’s episodic superhero TV, but in the style of Joss Whedon.”
In fact, I kind of wrote the pitch back in May of 2012:
I ended the movie wanting to see not Avengers 2 but a Black Widow/Hawkeye spin-off. Call itAgents of SHIELD and just have the two of them going after non-super powered terrorist bad guys.
But after two episodes, I’m basically done with the show. It’s not terrible, exactly. But it has lots of problems. In no particular order of importance:
* The f/x are terrible. Unexcusably so. This is prime-time, network TV in the year 2013 and the effects look like something from the mid-’90s. If you can’t bring the same level of believability that was inherent in Heroes or Fringe (or even Firefly) then there’s a problem.
* Tonally, it’s all over the map. Some people find the Whedon tongue grating. I am not one of them. But SHIELD feels like it’s getting maybe 15 percent of Whedon’s attention, meaning that you’re in pure Whedon wiseacre-ville one minute, and then in CW-style, ham-handed earnestness the next.
* There are too many characters and too few interesting characters. Stop trying to make Fitzsimmons happen. Fitzsimmons is never going to happen. And the hacktivist girl rocking the Shannon Dougherty thing is (a) less believable as a hacker than Elizabeth Shue was as a nuclear physicist and (b) less effective as an audience surrogate than, well, pick your own spectacular failure here (Shia in Transformers; Kitty Pryde in Inception).
I’d argue that SHIELD doesn’t need someone to stand in for audiences–we’ve had a slate of feature films which have grossed something like $17 billion to prepare us for the Marvel world. We’re not noobs anymore. We get it. Everyone gets it.
* I won’t complain about SHIELD being a monster-of-the-week show because most fantasy shows start out that way and I suspect that, given time to flower, it will develop its own arcs. But did SHIELD have to go through this awkward process? Couldn’t they just cut right to the Big Ideas?
I do wonder if the success of long-form TV (Justified, Breaking Bad, Sopranos) has built into audiences an expectation of narrative ambition that makes it possible to skip the episodic-baby-steps phase.
* Finally, I have a semi-major concern about the decision to ground SHIELD in the Marvel cinematic universe. Marvel has three coherent universes: The comics, the Ultimate comics, and the movies. They borrow from one another, but they all have their own continuity, more or less.
What happens if SHIELD fails? Does that tarnish the luster of Marvel movies? Or what if it succeeds, and has to pump out 23 episodes a year for 15 seasons. Does that hem in the writing for the movie universe?
Compare Marvel’s decision to integrate SHIELD into it’s movies to DC’s decision to wall off its TV shows–Smallville, Birds of Prey, Arrow–into a little garden that exists independently of either DC’s comics or movies. I’d argue that this maximizes both creative freedom and financial safety.
I understand why Marvel/Disney/ABC did what they did. I just don’t know that it seems wise.
* Really finally: Watch the pilot for SHIELD and compare it with the pilot for Arrow (airing on CW, now available on Netflix streaming). SHIELD has more money, a bigger creative playing field, a more established group of characters, and, I suspect, more corporate support.
Yet Arrow is superior in every facet. I’m not saying that Arrow is great TV. I’d posit that it’s the superhero equivalent of Burn Notice: Minimally serviceable, disposable entertainment.
If SHIELD could rise to that level, it would be a breakout hit.
Ben Boychuk October 15, 2013 at 11:05 am
Dammit, Last. You’re right. Please stop doing that.