‘WandaVision’: First Impressions
By: Dan Owen
Tags: Television, Marvel, Review, Culture, TV

This isn’t going to be a full-on review, as I haven’t seen every episode of WandaVision, and it’s a serialised mystery. Those tends to work better as overviews when everything’s been released, as I’ll end up criticising something that gets explained later on. So, for now, these are a collection of various thoughts I’d had after seeing the first two episodes on Disney+, elaborating on a few things I’ve tweeted about.

What is WandaVision?

In case you’ve been living under a rock for a few years, this is Marvel Studios’ first Disney+ TV show, taking characters from their blockbuster comic-book movies and placing them in serialised adventures on the small-screen. Specifically, Wanda “Scarlett Witch” Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen) and her android boyfriend Vision (Paul Bettany), who both debuted in Avengers: Age of Ultron and were last seen in Avengers: Endgame. (Spoiler: Vision sacrificed himself to protect the Mind Stone from villainous Thanos.)

What’s the show about?

We… don’t exactly know yet. One oddity with the first two episodes is the lack of context for anything we’re seeing. We’re just dropped into a faithful recreation of a 1950s black-and-white sitcom, with Wanda and Vision as a couple in suburbia, both trying to keep secrets from their new friends and neighbours — that Wanda has magic powers and Vision’s a robot. Bewitched is a major influence, and its opening titles are parodied in episode 2.

Sounds fun!

It sort of is, but it depends on your level of affection for classic US sitcoms and all their tropes. The first two episodes are full-blown episodes of a vintage TV studio-filmed comedy, with only brief moments when we’re made aware there’s a broader story happening beyond the confines of what we’re seeing “on TV”. I just have to wonder how many viewers will be turned off by the first episode, which makes few attempts to assure audiences this isn’t simply a quirky attempt to recreate an old sitcom using comic-book superheroes.

I can understand why Marvel would assume fans know where this might go and can be trusted to stick with it, but in reality I know people who watched half of the first episode and then turned it off. They’d assumed it was just some weird “experimental” special, like a mashup of two distinct genres, and vintage US sitcoms just aren’t to their taste. (I’ve assured them it isn’t, but when episode 2 proceeded to be much the same, they told me it doesn’t seem to be their sort of thing. I tried!)

I also struggle to imagine many of Marvel’s younger fans, the under-12’s, being at all interested in what’s being presented at face-value. Does 21st-century culture have any reverence for 1950s American sitcoms? They stopped being repeated in the ’80s, and must seem totally alien if you were born in the late-1990s. I hate to underestimate kids, but it just doesn’t strike me as something kids would be into, unlike The Mandalorian — which cleverly plays to old and new fans alike.

Once the mystery is revealed and the story develops, they’ll come back.

Maybe. It’s certainly true people who prematurely give up on it might be convinced to give it another shot (when more people report back that things get better later on), but it strikes me as odd Marvel started the show in this manner. There’s no assurances it’s doing anything other than recreate a sitcom until a later dinner table scene, when Wanda briefly rouses from her “sitcom wife” persona.

One could argue it’s fine to drip-feed clues in each episode, but sitting through almost full episode of a sitcom that’s otherwise played straight seems like an odd choice. I’m sure later episodes will involve more of a “breakdown” of the fictional world, and Disney+ possibly premiered two episodes to ensure we reach that stage sooner, but I think the balance was a bit off.

Maybe they should have released all the episodes at once.

That doesn’t seem to be Disney+’s style, as a traditional weekly release for The Mandalorian worked well for them. That Star Wars show benefitted from giving fans days to discuss each episode’s big moments and get excited for the next instalment. It also meant The Mandalorian hung around in public discourse for for months and not days, which helps extend its sense of relevance and importance. But yes, as of right now, WandaVision seems a bit short and thin to justify a weekly schedule.

I’m not excited for the next episode and would rather get on with seeing everything quicker, so the teething problems can soon become an old memory. However, this being a mystery show, I can understand why the weekly release option was chosen — as mysteries benefit from audiences clamouring for clues and theorising about what’s happening online between instalments. I just hope WandaVision’s mystery justifies the format!

If people don’t like WandaVision, that’s fine. It’s their loss.

Sure. I’m just trying to get inside the marketing mindset. WandaVision makes sense in terms of telling a story Marvel couldn’t possibly do in a movie, where there’s less time for longer narratives and character-focused stuff because those films demand an enormous set-piece every half-hour. But WandaVision wasn’t intended to be the first of their Disney+ shows, despite being thematically perfect because it’s being meta about TV. Falcon and the Winter Soldier was expected to launch their TV shows, which looks to be offering more of what MCU fans expect — big-screen thrills on the small-screen, with a longer storyline and more character moments. WandaVision isn’t as accessible, really.

It sounds like it hasn’t clicked… for now.

Exactly. It’s too early to pronounce WandaVision a success or failure after just two episodes, but I’d have done this differently. There’s odd stuff about it that doesn’t sit right with me. The ratio of “pure sitcom” to “clues about the mystery” seems all wrong to me, as I’d prefer things closer to how it worked in Life on Mars.

I understand the desire to accurately recreate a sitcom (which they do astonishingly well), but the first two episodes are 98% a cheesy comedy with old-fashioned jokes a studio audience are finding more hilarious than you. One wonders how much of these episodes will prove to be relevant come the finale. If this was a movie, one could communicate the idea that “Wanda and Vision are trapped in an old sitcom!” with a five-minute scene, before progressing on and explaining why.

Maybe there’s value to spending an extended amount of time in a Pleasantville world, which will become clear later, but it gives the show an oddly hemmed in feel. Maybe that has something to do with how these characters have previously only been experienced as visual playthings in the midst of big ensembles, saving the universe from otherwordly threats, with only a few scenes to explore their relationship. It’s a testament to the actors that they made it work and people were emotional when Vision died in Infinity War, but now seeing them as a romantic couple in a cheesy TV comedy is so weird. They’ve already had more screentime dedicated to them then in all of the previous films, haven’t they? It’s close.

Are the characters enough to keep you watching?

Well, this is another odd thing about WandaVision. Neither character is particularly interesting in the MCU, beyond the inherent intrigue of an artificial being like Vision learning about humanity. Wanda and Vision’s relationship just sort of happened between movies, too, so I can’t say either of them stand out as character I want to know more about. Wanda’s twin brother died in Infinity War, and yet she’s never mentioned him since then, so I’m not sure the writers are on top of things.

Of course, it could be argued that dedicating a TV series to them is therefore a brilliant way to flesh them out, as they’re more deserving of that compared more prominent MCU characters that have their own solo movies. And that’s true! But then why open your TV show with two episodes where each character isn’t really there? We’re just seeing Wanda and Vision “act” like stereotypes from a ’50s household sitcom, so we haven’t learned anything about them as individuals yet. It’s all just a performance. I’m sure their real selves will become more accessible in later episodes, in a Truman Show-esque arc of them discovering this world is fake and they need to escape… but, it feels odd to me.

Are you going to watch the rest?

Of course. It’s a miniseries, so not a major commitment of anyone’s time. And I hear the TV parodies will leap forward into decades that hold greater resonance for me, too, as a child of the ’80s and teen of the ‘90s. The mystery will hopefully become more of the focus later on, and the characters will start to leave these alternative sitcom roles to remember who they really are.

It could become a great show. I just have issues with how they decided to launch it, together with a few of the creative decisions, particularly because there’s a strange split in reaction between online and offline. The reviews are good-to-great and my Twitter stream is mostly positive, but people I know in “reality” (i.e. ordinary folk who don’t read Marvel forums, or use social media to discuss the MCU, or even knew this show was coming to Disney+ until a few weeks ago), have found it perplexing and off-putting.

So I think it’s worth debating the pros and cons of WandaVision’s creative risks and Marvel’s decision-making.