Dave, Charlotte and Zack talk Secret Invasion, and the upcoming new Invincible podcast!
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Up Next: My Marvelous Year — 2004 pt. 3
| Avengers Disassembled | Full CBH reading order OR Avengers #500 to #503, Avengers Finale #1 | You can definitely just read the core event issues. That said, this begins the modern era of Marvel events, which means there are a bunch of related tie-ins. For my money, Thor Disassembled is the most essential. |
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About the MCU-TV part of the episode and the question in the title, I think that the genesis of all MCU-TV problems lie within the fact that they never figured out their format.
Most of the shows are a 6 episode series that work as a kinda of 6 hour movie, with a few exceptions (Loki has a Season 2, Wandavision and She-Hulk have more episodes, and they’re are also shorter and flirt with actual TV). Now, the products that the MCU puts out mostly in movies are mostly: 110-130 minute movies, packed with action and humor (trying not to do too much of any of them), for “the whole family”, trying to get more and more people to hop into the MCU train and watch “the next one”. They are mostly ok, for “everybody” and try to sell the “Extende Universe” experience without the homework it usually includes in comics, but also keeping things thigher than yout usual movie franchise.
The MCU shows try to do the same thing with TV, but they couldn’t quite figure out how to fit their audience, budget and production logic into a show. Popular shows are mostly longer, cheaper and cheesy-er (and those things usually mean that they also hire “tv actors”), while “prestige” shows have bigger budgets (usually), less episodes and more “realistic” tones, or are in general “emotionally grounded” (and that means that higher caliber actors and directors are available, specially after Big Little Lies). There is a middle ground, stuff like FX. AMC, Netflix (specially in those 2014-2017 days), but if you look at the specifics of the MCU shows they usually resamble one of these two. Big budgets like an HBO hit show, popular appeal like an ABC drama, great movie stars like Samuel Jackson, Olivia Colman, Oscar Isaac, the PG-13 rating like “for the whole family” shows but with a shorter episode number like a prestige limited series, etc etc. And part of the audience looks at that and expects what expensive shows with big stars usually deliver, but it’s not at all what those shows are trying to do.
The result is that most of their shows either look like “the best CW show ever” or “the worst Emmy-Nominated limited series you have ever seen”. It’s not like you can’t find a middle ground, Netflix did that with their 13 episodes structure (now reduced to 10) and this kinda set the format for streaming too, 8-13 episodes per season, with a runtime of 50-70minutes that gives the people behind the show a little bit more time to do things (specially because most TV shows are 50/55 minute anyway but the networks used to cut them to 40/45 minutes). But still, those MCU shows don’t fit any of those formats, and is not like their current structure is a genius move for that.
Most of the MCU shows have a strong beggining, a tone shift around the 2nd or 3rd episode, a plot twist around the 4th or 5th and the 6th episode is where the CGI fest, blue beam in the sky “3rd act of the movie” comes in. This is even true for the 2 shows that gave more than 6 episodes. Did it work? Well the terrible ending of Wandavision didn’t screw the whole show’s popularity, Falcon doesn’t have a twist so the ending with the Captain America reveal was the most talked-about part of the show and Loki switched the positions of the CGI fest and the twist, so episode 5 was the climax and 6 the twisty cliffhanger. But from then on, people seemed less and less engaged on the shows, the twists and the final episodes, and in most of the cases they actually harmed the narratives (why does Hawkeye need a twist? Why Moon Knight needs to go all Power Rangers right after it’s only good episode? Why Ms. Marvel so abruptly went from high school to interdimensional aliens to giant final battle?).
And it’s the same with Secret Invasion. Rhodey being a Skrull happens when it happens because that’s where these shows do their twists, but with Wandavision or Loki or even Moon Knight, the twists were built upon the previous episodes, not the past few years of MCU continuity, so maybe it should’ve happened earlier? The final episode is once again the CGI fest third act fight, but in a (supposed) Nick Fury spy show about a problem that can’t be fixed by the usual Marvel heroes, why the ending has to be a fight between two Super Skrulls? Because “it’s the way it’s done”
TL;DR: The first couple of Marve shows worked and they thought that doing those exact same formats and structures to almost every show was the move, because in the movies they did the same thing and it worked. But movies are not shows and blockbusters are not popular tv.
Also: The shows usually try to tap into specific genres or styles, but these are quickly toned down to that “standard” MCU tone/look. Does this work with movies? I don’t like it but yes it does. Does it work with 6 hour shows? No goddamn it
And that’s also the thing, asking their audience (aka everybody, because those movies are not for nerds or cinephiles or whatever, they try to go for the largest audience possible) to watch two or three 2 hour movies a years? Fine. Asking them to watch like four 6 hours shows per year? Just don’t, most people dropped after Loki and came back in one or other show here and there, and the people insane enought to watch it all and lesser and lesser everyday