WandaVision Isn't Interested in Your Puny Mortal Television Conventions

In fact, it's demonstrably uninterested in anything that doesn't relate back to the all-important MCU!

Several weeks into the weekly Disney+ sensation WandaVision, when the show was still primarily offering the sight of superheroes doing studied imitations of sitcom domesticities, a debate emerged, about whether the series was taking too much time to offer the audience more concrete answers. At the time, this discussion was primarily framed as reconciling the lost art of pre-binge television—how there is value in the stand-alone episode, in the weekly release schedule, in the not knowing. (Remember Lost? It had so much not knowing, and some of it was great!) Now that WandaVision has ended its nine-episode run to great acclaim, the consensus seems to be that Marvel knew what they were doing, and patient viewers could appreciate it, so long as they weren’t dead set on having their fan theories about the debut of Mr. Fantastic or Magneto or Firestar confirmed.

But what if that early debate did accidentally capture WandaVision’s ultimate failures? In retrospect, the show wasn’t reviving old viewing formats all. For all of its referencing of TV tropes and history, and for all of its reclaiming the appointment-viewing model of broadcasting, WandaVision never really engaged with television as a medium. Like so many attempts by the Marvel Cinematic Universe to branch out and experiment beyond the usual bounds of pew-pew-wisecrack-pew superhero stories, it was unable to achieve escape velocity from its own constricted universe—in large part because it evinced so little interest in the mechanics of television.

This didn’t seem to be the case early on, as the show dedicated most of its running time to faithfully reproducing the dynamics of various older sitcoms—I Love Lucy, The Dick Van Dyke Show, Bewitched, The Brady Bunch, and so on, all through the years. There were warning signs that these shows were being mixed and matched for convenience, not verisimilitude: The opening credits of the 1950s-style premiere “Filmed Before a Live Studio Audience” pay homage to Dick Van Dyke, later revealed as a particularly formative influence on young Wanda, which made it seem like WandaVision was conflating that 1960s show with more politely domesticated sitcoms of an earlier decade. Laura Petrie’s infamous capri pants and Mary Tyler Moore’s general performance style emerge, more appropriately, in the second episode, which the show attempted to orient around Bewitched—and it’s hard to avoid almost every episode feeling a little like Bewitched when you’re making a fake sitcom about a witch in suburbia. For that matter, how was Wanda’s later-revealed encyclopedic fandom of half a century’s worth of American sitcoms maintained over such a short and tumultuous period in her life?

On their own, these minor contradictions could be chalked up to the same reality-cracking quality that gradually collapsed Wanda’s sitcom-comfort existence. And WandaVision’s pastiche-heavy reproductions of sitcom culture are often very good, especially in the impressively flexible performances from Olsen and Bettany. The aggregate effect of the committed performances and amalgamated art direction, though, is to disguise WandaVision’s overall indifference to its source material.

For its first three episodes, the show sets up an intentionally corny, trope-filled TV plot, and let the illusion go haywire earlier and earlier. “Live Studio Audience” is essentially just Wanda and Vision in a 1950s sitcom episode, with just a handful of Twilight Zone moments sprinkled in at the end. The second episode, “Don’t Touch That Dial,” has a little more mystery, but still dedicates a large chunk of screentime to a farcical sequence where Vision swallows gum and acts drunk at a town-square magic show. The third, “Now in Color,” baby-steps into more weirdness with an unnaturally accelerated pregnancy.

It’s possible to enjoy these early episodes on their own terms, despite their general emphasis on Full House-style banality over Dick Van Dyke-style virtuosity. Over time, though, that emphasis makes WandaVision feel like it’s stripping old sitcoms for their corniest, most familiar parts in order to make a case for their unifying fakeness. As WandaVision’s homages move through the ’80s, ’00s, and 2010s, bigger cracks form in Wanda’s manufactured existence—the happy-faced existential prison she built out of her own pain. (Conspicuously absent: a true show of the ’90s, maybe because the most prominent family sitcom of that era, Roseanne, offers a thornier vision of a TV family, less easily reduced to stylized escapism and spot-that-trope games.) Wanda’s fake sitcom world is repeatedly contrasted with the pain, grief, and, yes, trauma of the “real” world—which is to say, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which increasingly seems like the only world that matters to this enterprise.

Many would argue that WandaVision uses the innocuousness of old sitcoms as an ingenious cover to explore richer themes. And the show does offer some clever observations about, say, the neatness of resolution offered by sentimental sitcoms like Full House and the controlled, limited environment within which they can acknowledge sanitized versions of death and loss. Unfortunately, these observations are mostly used in service of reductive truisms about entertainment as a form of escape, bolstered with some truly clumsy psychology. The backstory-heavy penultimate episode “Previously On” confirms that these shows would be used primarily as a psychological checklist: Wanda watched Dick Van Dyke with her family before they died; Wanda shared Malcolm in the Middle with Vision at a time of grief; Wanda, uh, watched The Brady Bunch during her imprisonment as the subject of crypto-Nazi experiments. So, after an unlikely life as a superpowered sitcom aficionado, she constructed her dream home out of her happy TV memories, with variations on the formula reflecting her psyche’s defense mechanisms. Real life sad, TV happy. Wanda’s illusion was ultimately destructive to others, because they were forced into her idea of personal happiness while secretly bearing the weight of her grief.

Again, this could be poignant—especially if anyone involved with WandaVision seemed to regard the TV episode as a satisfying format unto itself, and did the work of subverting the show’s TV bona fides from within. Instead, the very idea of a one-off episode that exists first and foremost to tell a compact story in full with previously established characters is treated as something of a put-on: cornball fakeness, a strange experiment, a mystery to be solved... basically, anything but a viable format unto itself. Sitcoms are weekly piffle and WandaVision has something more going on because, to bastardize the old HBO slogan, it’s not TV; it’s the MCU.

Fair enough that WandaVision always intended to engineer its sitcom stories as imitations within a larger system, rather than producing a “real” sitcom with superheroes (although it’s not unthinkable that a more dexterous show might try to attempt both, or at least continue toying with the medium in its crucial final hours). But the other advantages of TV—developing characters over a more gradual period; telling stories of different shapes and sizes than two-hour features—go largely ignored, too. The show insists on spending time outside the “Hex,” as Darcy (Kat Dennings) calls Wanda’s conjured-up town, and not only is this material deadly—insert-quip-here dialogue rhythms, nonstop cliches, and generic control-room sets—it avoids any semblance of character development. It drops the audience into the middle of a bottom-tier MCU movie, with the previously introduced Darcy, Jimmy Woo (Randall Park), and Monica Rambeau (Teyonah Parris) positioned as our scrappy good-guy B-team. As in other MCU movies, the actors are charismatic and talented; unlike many MCU movies, they fail to do anything remotely interesting. The normal humans have no story arcs, no real relationships to each other or anyone else. They’re pulled off the supporting-character bench with seemingly no awareness that a TV episode’s B-story might actually have its own value beyond its reflection of the “real” stars. Monica’s grief over the loss of her mother, for example, doesn’t particularly inform her character, beyond lending her some baseline empathy for Wanda (which is shared by all of the other good-hearted characters on the show anyway). This half-formed bond is there primarily to give she and Wanda something to nod solemnly over, in the finale’s simulation of emotional catharsis. It’s not just the citizens of Westview who are just vessels for reactions to WandaVision—hence Darcy’s cutesy-meta comment in the fourth episode that she’s become emotionally invested in Wanda and Vision’s story.

Maybe it’s hard to buy Darcy’s throwaway line because the show doesn’t seem to understand why anyone would feel attached to a TV show; just that it would happen if it’s in front of them during trauma. (The show can’t even be bothered to imagine fragments of additional, unseen episodes of WandaVision; in the fourth episode, characters monitor Wanda’s broadcast for hours without glimpsing anything beyond the handful of episodes we’ve seen ourselves.) That could be why the show limits character development for its leads, too. Despite the impressive range of personas and styles she adopts, Olsen’s big dramatic moments consist largely of the show “revealing” things about Wanda that were already strong implied or directly shown by other MCU productions, only with the twist that was also watching TV the whole time. By the end of the show, she has fully transformed into the Scarlet Witch, which means... she is a very powerful superhero who can make beams of red energy emanate from her hands. Which she was before. (For that matter, she also grieved before this show began. Oh, and the character she’s grieving will probably be back in another form.) Now her backstory includes the sitcom solution and her powers are bigger. What does this actually mean? Tune in for the next thing to find out. One near-guarantee: Wanda’s affinity for sitcoms will probably not inform her character going forward, unless Darcy makes a cutesy meta-joke about it in another movie.

Stretching a thin story over a protracted running time is not an uncommon problem with streaming shows. Absent the strengths of its medium, the distended nature of WandaVision is its closest link to contemporary TV. Specifically, its later-season shapelessness recalls the more adult-oriented MCU shows that ran on Netflix, which seemingly hadn’t the faintest idea of why TV-based stories might be shaped into discrete, specific episodes. (That Marvel gumshoe Jessica Jones never really solved stand-alone hourlong mysteries on her TV show is one of the most baffling unforced errors in recent comics-adaptation history.) Even on those terms, though, there’s a bizarre extra pomp in WandaVision’s presentation: Each episode features the MCU’s trademark endless logo that dutifully showcases full-motion clips from multiple movies, and each episode ends with “cinematic” end credits with fancy graphics and star billings preceding a more typical credit roll. Put together, these movie-style touches can take up as much as 25% of some episodes’ running time.

The point is not that WandaVision should have more carefully timed itself out to better mimic the style of other TV shows (although, seriously: must that logo take a pre-emptive victory lap in front of every Marvel property?). But maybe if it was conceived more clearly as a TV show, rather than an elaborate fake-out leading to more energy-beam battles, it wouldn’t feel so much like one more asset in the MCU portfolio. Some of the writing and performances still manage to exhibit real feeling: Making a cyborg a vessel of such emotional directness, for example, is a lovely touch, beautifully acted by Bettany. It’s a shame that the show seems convinced that these things aren’t ultimately areas where regular TV excels; to achieve them, the format must be broken.

This mutating format might have resulted in some creative blurring of boundaries between television and film, something the MCU has been toying with for years. Instead, Nick Fury’s “bigger universe” must be evoked at the expense of our puny human one. Lip service to complex emotions is paid; supervillains are easily dispatched; characters are killed and un-killed; comics-accurate costumes are donned, in the same shade of muted magenta. No wonder that WandaVision looked most vibrant in 22-minute black and white; it felt briefly like someone at least imposed a different kind of limitation on the material. Ultimately, the Marvel gang doesn’t show much interest in formal boundaries and how they affect a viewer’s relationship with what they watch. They’ve envisioned a world where television conventions, film genres, and real-life resonance are all subservient footnotes in an infinite, all-encompassing mega-narrative. Maybe Wanda looks lonely taking in all those sitcoms because no one else in her universe is watching Dick Van Dyke or Malcolm in the Middle. The rest of them can’t wait to get back to the superheroes.