After a Decade of Episodic Storytelling, Marvel Made Actual TV Episodes - The Ringer

WandaVision, the new limited series on Disney+ that marks a major turning point in the Marvel Cinematic Universe and its complex relationship with the small screen, is just the latest to employ it.

“But no, it’s six Marvel movies packed into what they’re presenting as a sitcom.”.

Beyond the implied condescension, there’s the fact that the distinction between movies and TV shows is on the verge of collapse, making comparisons almost meaningless.

But WandaVision is the first show to exist under the creative control of Marvel Studios, the elite squadron captained by producer Kevin Feige that turned a clutch of comic book IP into a wildly lucrative constellation of interlocking stories—a structure that borrows heavily from the blueprint of TV.

What does it mean for a TV show to be like a movie when the TV show stars characters from movies, which are serialized and collectively written like a TV show, and when the TV show itself is setting up a subsequent movie.

In the three episodes provided to critics, two of which landed on Disney+ last Friday, WandaVision takes the form of ’50s and ’60s domestic sitcoms à la I Love Lucy or Bewitched and a ’70s family show à la The Brady Bunch; these faux shows just happen to star a sentient supercomputer and a European witch.

Due to unforeseen circumstances, WandaVision even substitutes for Marvel movies rather than just complementing them.

WandaVision even has a jump on other Disney+ series like The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, the show originally intended to kick-start the TV branch of the so-called Phase 4.

Instead, it’s WandaVision that leads a slate which will soon include Loki, the anthology series What If…?, Hawkeye, Ms.

Schaeffer and the writers borrow and riff on classic tropes like “the boss and his wife come to dinner” (Fred Melamed and Debra Jo Rupp, the latest character actors to collect those Marvel checks) or “pregnant woman gives birth in seconds.” The show isn’t a single, extended story arbitrarily chopped into parts, but a collection of legible bits—not unlike the MCU, but without having to pay $20 to see said bits in the theater every few months.

When names like Ultron and Pietro Maximoff start to pop up, WandaVision loses some of the quirk that makes it an intriguing, if accidental, introduction to the Disney+ era of the MCU.