Congratulations to Agatha All Along for being the third good Marvel show on Disney+

The story of the movies in the 2010s is basically the story of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Iron Man laid the foundation in 2008, but The Avengers turned the franchise into a proper phenomenon in 2012. From there, Disney rode the wave all the way to the bank. Things climaxed in 2019, with three Marvel movies — Captain Marvel, Avengers: Endgame and Spider-Man: Far From Home — all making over a billion dollars.

That was around the time the streaming wars were really getting underway, so Disney and Marvel Studios set their sights on a new realm to conquer: television. Things got off to a solid start with WandaVision, a surprisingly esoteric show about Wanda Maximoff that took inspiration from, of all things, sitcoms through the ages. Back in 2021, people were enraptured by this show; the buzz was very real.

And then things seemed to taper off. The Falcon and the Winter Soldier came next, and it was solid, if a bit by-the-numbers. Loki was a step in the right direction, but it was the last sure step Marvel would take for a while. The shows to follow could be fun, but seemed at once too slight to be part of the epic Marvel Cinematic Universe (Hawkeye) and not sufficiently compelling on their own merits to stand apart from it (Moon Knight). A lot of these shows were damned by a sense of being good-but-not-good-enough (Ms. Marvel). And then there was Secret Invasion, which was just straight-up bad, a purportedly sweeping drama about an alien invasion that mostly boiled down to Samuel L. Jackson and a couple of friends confronting people one by one in small rooms.

Marvel seemed to be losing its mojo on both TV and at the movies, where their fortunes had been slipping thanks to commercial disappointments like Eternals and The Marvels. With all this behind us, I wasn't expecting much from Agatha All Along, a follow-up to WandaVision that drills down on fan favorite baddie Agatha Harkness (Kathryn Hahn). I figured it would be yet another half-developed Marvel show that had an idea of why it should exist, but not a really good reason.

Well, I was wrong. Agatha All Along wrapped up its first season with a two-part finale last night, and while I don't think it's a perfect show, it was entertaining from start to finish and has a strong sense of what and why it is, something too many Marvel shows can't boast.

What Agatha All Along did right

So how did Agatha All Along get past the defenses so many other Marvel shows failed to penetrate? When in doubt, make a list:

• The casting. Sometimes, all a show has to do is cast the right actors in the right roles and let them do the rest. Agatha All Along had the good sense to cast people like Kathryn Hahn, Aubrey Plaza, Sasheer Zamata and Patti LuPone and then to let them volley, allowing them to build up a sassy, dangerous, funny chemistry that gained momentum as the show went on. Pretty much any of the actors on this show could hold down their own series, and putting them all together was a recipe for success. And how perfect was the goth-coded Plaza as Death? Some casting decisions make themselves.
• The style. Marvel movies and shows alike can struggle with the studio's house style; go too far afield of it and they risk not feeling like part of the MCU, stick too close and they can feel boring. Agatha All Along strikes the right balance. With its sharp color palette, zinger-heavy dialogue, frequent costume changes, musical interludes, overt queerness and a plot that relies on magical logic, Agatha All Along doesn't feel like anything else in the MCU, but it's still consistent within itself.
• Threading the needle. This may sound like a back-handed compliment, but I think the best moments of Agatha All Along were the ones where I forgot it was part of the MCU and I was just enjoying the trip down the witches' road. By the same token, I didn't enjoy some of the bits that tied explicitly back to the wider MCU, in part because I was afraid the show was about to lose what was unique and special about itself. But Agatha All Along never quite crossed that line.
• The darkness. Marvel has a reputation for being sanitary. Characters can push moral boundaries but not cross them. So I was happy that Agatha Harkness remained a bit of a duplicitous monster right through to the end, killing witches en masse without regret. And yet we still liked her; her backstory with her son was moving and Hahn is simply too charming to write off. The show also had real stakes, with characters like Alice and Lilia dying (spectacularly) and not coming back.

What can Marvel learn from Agatha All Along?

Agatha All Along isn't a perfect series. I give some leeway to plots about magic, but I still don't quite understand all the rules. So Agatha took Alice's powers halfway through the series but then has to take Billy's powers later? What happened to the power she took before? But I can easily ignore that quibble in the face of how enjoyable the show was a whole.

Agatha All Along shares a lot of these pros with WandaVision and Loki, the other two Marvel shows that really impressed me: they're not afraid to experiment stylistically, they have actual stakes, and characters worth rooting for (and against). And two of them were created by Jac Schaeffer, who must care about her projects enough to spend time and effort developing them into something worthwhile.

Honestly, I don't think there's anything wrong with Marvel TV shows (or movies) that can't be fixed with time and effort. Some judiciousness would be helpful, too. Marvel should only greenlight a show if there's a great idea behind it, if the creative team is excited about it, and if they can take their time building, casting and finessing it. And I think Disney knows this; earlier this year, CEO Bob Iger said that Marvel Studios had lost "focus" and promised a shift in strategy to emphasize quality over quantity, which is definitely the right call. Maybe we'll get more shows like Agatha All Along in the future and fewer shows so forgettable I can't be bothered to list them at the end of this article.

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