In the US: Tuesdays, 9/8c, ABC
One of the biggest, medium-changing successes of the past half-decade has been the Marvel Avengers movies. Combining both the individual and ensemble adventures of superheroes Iron Man, Thor, Captain America and the Incredible Hulk, the Avengers series has taken billions of dollars around the world and launched whole new movie franchises with other superheroes in a roadmap laid out until 2020 or so.
There are superhero movies everywhere and movie producers are looking for even more superheroes to film, even as we speak.
The effect hasn’t been restricted to just films and comics, either. Series featuring Marvel superheroes are set to fill up Netflix and on TV, for example. However, those feature the likes of Daredevil, Jessica Jones and Luke Cage, rather than anyone in the Avengers movies themselves.
Which is a problem. If any of the audience wanted an Avengers spin-off TV series at all, it was featuring characters they’d grown to know and love.
On ABC, of course, we have Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD featuring Agent Coulson from the movie series, but when audiences around the world were watching (The) Avengers (Assemble), they weren’t thinking, “We’d really like a TV show featuring a bunch of whole new people and that guy who’s in three movies for about five minutes and then gets killed in this one.”
No, they were thinking, “We want a Black Widow movie.”
That’s not happening, though. Stupid producers.
Perhaps the most obvious candidate to star in a TV series who wasn’t Scarlett Johansson and commanding a double-digit million dollar salary was Hayley Atwell’s Agent Carter from Captain America: The First Avenger. A wartime spy and soldier who loved – and was loved by – Captain America, she was feisty, fun, well acted and had a tragic ending to her story – after all, Captain America ends up frozen underwater until he wakes up in modern times, never able to make that date he’d arranged with her.
Marvel puts the feelers out for a potential Agent Carter series on the Iron Man 3 DVD, giving us one of their Marvel One Shots, with Carter working post-war for a spy outfit run by Bradley Whitford, the only problem being she’s a woman and no one takes her seriously. At the end, Carter joins her wartime compatriot, Iron Man’s dad Howard Stark, in setting up the future SHIELD.
Since then, she’s popped up in Captain America 2 as well as Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD, but if you thought a full series of Agent Carter adventures was on the cards, you’d have been mistaken – the order for that is probably sitting under the long-lost script for that Black Widow movie – because coming to our screens is ABC’s now-traditional filler approach to mid-season replacements: a limited series of just eight episodes.
And if you thought it would be all about what Carter got up to running SHIELD, think again. Again.
Because despite the fact it includes footage from that DVD One-Shot, Marvel’s Agent Carter is set before it in 1946, detailing just one of her cases while working post-War for the Strategic Science Reserve. Howard Stark (Dominic Cooper) has disappeared, apparently selling weapons to US enemies, but he emerges to reveal to Carter that the truth is that some of his secret inventions have been stolen. He asks her to recover the weapons and clear his name, with the help of his butler, Jarvis (James D’Arcy) – and decidedly not with the help of all those sexists back at the SSR who just want Peggy to make the tea.
Given the period setting, Atwell, guest appearances by fan favourites, references to other Marvel properties and all the opportunities a prequel can present, you’d think that Marvel’s Agent Carter would be a slam dunk. But while it’s certainly a whole lot more entertaining and exciting than Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD was when it started, it’s still not the must-see you’d have expected. Here’s a trailer.
Continue reading “Review: Marvel’s Agent Carter 1×1-1×2 (US: ABC)”
