Review Wednesdays: The Problem with Marvel's Agents of Shield

I've been watching Agents of Shield for two reasons.

The first being that I am a massive comic book nerd with a compulsive need to consume anything and everything with a Marvel logo stamped on it (see: my complete collection of Captain Marvel comic books, my Spider-Man duvet and the fact that I am almost certainly going to pay actual money to go and see the Ant-Man film).

The second is that this season's flavour of Hot Girls Miss Isles Fancies The Pants Off is apparently trending toward 'geeky/techy/super-intelligent ladies in sensible shoes being awesome', and Elizabeth Henstridge's adorable performance as Jemma Simmons fits the bill nicely.  For more on that front see also: Felicity Smoak on Arrow, and Cosima Niehaus on Orphan Black. Intelligence is sexy, yo.

Please note, however, that I'm not watching Agents of Shield because I think that the show is... brilliant.

Don't get me wrong, it's passable – it's cute, the cast are cute, Elizabeth Henstridge is SUPER CUTE. But it's nowhere near the unmissable juggernaut I was expecting before it premièred last Autumn. Instead, it's an okay distraction that I stick on when I'm hoovering, cleaning the kitchen or turning the heel on a sock I'm knitting. The cast are certifiably adorable, and as a result the characters are reasonably charming. I've been pulled in by their precious wee faces enough to be following most of the cast on twitter, to have a short playlist dedicated to Skye/Simmons on my iTunes and to have deliberately sought out fic to read.

Also Minga-Na Wen, playing Agent May, was the voice of Mulan in the titular character’s Disney film and thus I feel I owe her a significant chunk of my childhood's imaginary landscape.

But it's telling that what little investment I have is entirely bound up with the show's cast and it's fanbase - the femslashers in particular, as always, being the coolest kids to hang round with - rather than, say, the show's actual content. I got to liking Skye, the show's audience surrogate, only after finding fanworks that added much needed depth and intrigue to the character's psychology, and after watching interviews in which Chloe Bennet's enthusiasm for the character was infectious enough to soften me up. The character as-written on the show is... pretty effing bland (sorry Chloe, I appreciate you're doing your best). 

Agents of Shield lacks something. It's ratings are solid enough, but critically it's a mess, and Marvel fans are more likely than not to be complaining that it's dull. And I can't disagree. Certainly, compared to last year's other breakout new show Sleepy Hollow, there's been a distinct lack of forward moment for AoS. It took eight episodes to establish only a single plot point, and in that time it failed to develop the characters enough for me to care by the time we discovered that Skye may or may not be an alien.

Is it simply that no show could have lived up to the hype of a Marvel spin-off? Maybe... but I also think it just isn't being run very well. My hunch is that Agents of Shield is suffering because a certain amount of nepotism has left the wrong people in charge.

For those who are unaware, the Agents of Shield totes itself as one of Joss Whedon's creations, but the legendary showrunner and writer-director of The Avengers, was only really involved with the pilot, and has almost nothing to do with AoS's daily running. (This is clear enough from the fact that the entirety of the cast is in fact still alive this far into proceedings.) Instead, at the helm are Joss's brother Jed, and Jed's wife Maurissa Tancharoen.

Both Jed Whedon and Tancharoen have a fair number of TV credits, but almost all of them are associated with Joss's projects – you take away any job they wouldn't have got without his involvement, and both their filmographies start to look incredibly thin for execs on such a big show. Hell, even with Joss Whedon-related work, neither of them have the sorts of projects under their belts you'd expect showrunners to have experience with. Tancharoen has only been a staff writer once, on another Whedon show: Dollhouse. Jed Whedon has more credits as a composer than he does as a producer. You compare that to the track record of Joss Whedon himself, the sort of heavy hitter you would expect to be in charge of a show this big, and both Jed and Tancharoen start to look woefully inexperienced.

It's frustrating to see such a blatant case of who you know being more important than how much experience or talent you have, especially when Agents of Shield is... well, just passable. These situations are much easier to forgive when the output is stellar – say what you want about Steven Moffat's shows (and oh, I could say a lot), but doing 99% of his work with his wife and best mate Mark Gatiss has produced some juggernauts in the British TV industry, from Coupling to Sherlock.

Sue Virtue, however, was and remains a powerhouse producer without her husband's involvement and Gatiss has similarly vast experience outside of his work with Moffat. Both these individuals would likely be getting high profile projects whether or not Moffat was involved.

The same cannot be said of Jed Whedon and Tancharoen. By comparison with something like Sherlock, Agents of Shield has failed to attract much of a fanbase or make any particular cultural waves. The AoS fanbase certainly exists, but makes up a proportionally tiny section of the wider Marvel fanbase. In fact, it's particularly telling of the show's failings that it has made so little impact on Marvel's fanbase, a fanbase that should have been difficult not to attract. A brief glance at Archive of Our Own turns up roughly 67025 fanworks under the general Marvel tag, compared to just 2064 under the specific Agents of Shield tag. Where is the force of the wider Marvel fanbase for Agents of Shield?

A show with Whedon's name on it ought to have attracted at least a strong cult following. A show with Marvel's logo on it certainly ought to have. And between them you'd definitely expect a consistently exciting, daring show full of compelling characters getting into interesting situations. Instead what we have is something that is only slightly more entertaining than the most stagnant seasons of CSI have been. And when you're only one step above a crime procedural so formulaic that you can predict the story beats down to the minute, I'd suggest something might be wrong.

The shame of it is, Jed Whedon and Maurissa Tancharoen are clearly not incompetent – Agents of Shield does at least hang together, the plots are coherent and the characterisation is consistent, if rather stagnant feeling. But they've been left on their own and as a result they look like kids dressing up in their parents' clothes: the shape of what's meant to be there is clear enough, but the execution is almost laughably amateurish. It's just boring, and has had pacing issues throughout, perhaps the clearest sign that the people in charge are not especially experienced. A knowledgable showrunner would not have spent eight episodes setting up only one plot point, for instance. What the show needs is someone at its helm with a little more vision and a great deal more technical knowledge of how to structure multi-episode story arcs.

As a result, a really great opportunity to further the Marvel universe on-screen has been badly squandered and, ultimately, its the audience that has been cheated, because someone somewhere didn't bother to look beyond Joss Whedon's front garden for competent showrunners.

Thanks to steady, if not stellar, ratings, AoS is almost certain to be renewed for a second season, and whether it can hold its audience at that point will be the test of whether the show can grow legs – although it won't necessarily say anything about the quality of the programming itself. See: the fact that CSI is in it's fourteenth bloody season, where Firefly, arguably Whedon's greatest work, was cancelled after only eleven episodes – albeit with a fanbase that is still vibrant eleven years later.

Tancharoen seems to have at least vaguely admitted to Agents of Shield's pacing issues, referencing some “growing pains”, but insisting that “we’rehappy we’re getting the kind of season where we feel like we’rereally hitting our stride” . So hopefully the kids in their parents clothes are gonna grow into them soon enough. It just seems a shame, and a little disrespectful of the viewing public, that two inexperienced writer-producers got to use a twenty two episode season of a multi-million dollar TV show in a massive and beloved pre-existing universe, as their classroom. Don't audiences deserve better than that?