Random thoughts after rewatching Agent Carter S1

[sholio]

I finished my Agent Carter season one rewatch -- I was originally planning to post about the episodes as I watched them, but as I've said before, I'm terrible with follow-through on that kind of thing. Also, it took me like a month to watch all eight episodes, and it was taking even longer to watch new episodes because I kept feeling like I should write a post about the last one. I only seem to have two settings on TV shows: "binge-watch" and "snail".

Anyway, I'm still blown away at how good this show is. It's such a perfect, perfect little piece of television ... though of course the usual caveats apply: perfect for me. I know other people have criticisms and various ways the show let them down, and those are entirely valid for you! Of course nothing is really perfect, or can be all things to all people.

But rewatching season one after watching season two makes me love season one all the harder (and I loved it pretty hard to begin with), because the character stuff is so good. The character development for everybody, and the growth of all the different character relationships, unspools so well and so seamlessly from the first episode of season one to the last episode of season two. There's just so much thought that went into it. It's fascinating to remember watching this season the first time, because season two went ahead and gave me all the stuff I thought I had at the end of season one. I remember being so excited that everyone was starting to come together and get teamy and become friends by the end of season one, but now after watching season two, it makes me go, "Wow, it's really just the seeds of it so far, isn't it?" Everything I wanted at the end of season one, I got. (Well, okay, not quite everything, but so much more of what I wanted than I ever dared hope for, as well as a bunch of truly lovely things that I didn't even know I wanted!)

There is not a single episode in either season that I can't just start playing on a random scene and have it make me happy.

But I also think some of the things that make this show "my show" are reasons why it didn't do better on network TV. Not just the central and integral female POV, but also that doesn't have the fast pace and dazzle that is the modern TV action-show aesthetic. It's a show that unfolds slowly, with a lot of talking, a lot of low-key character stuff, and very few big fight scenes. It's not all quippy one-liners, gunfights and car chases, and sexy young people having relationship drama.

I really think part of the problem is that the show had an audience, but the audience never really found it -- they would be people who like period stuff, people who like spy stuff, people who like dramas. The audience who liked Mad Men or The Americans are the people who should have been watching this, but I think ABC just never managed to get the show in front of those people, because they're not really into superhero stuff and it was marketed more as a superhero show.

Plus, ABC's lackluster promotion of the show is pretty obvious. It's STILL not streaming on any of the fee-per-month services, that I know of, and the season one DVDs were an Amazon exclusive, so not available in stores. Netflix doesn't even have the DVDs! You can buy the episodes individually from places like iTunes and Amazon, which is great for hardcore fans (... me), but you're never going to pick up casual viewers that way, and that's what a show needs to do well.

But it has a very enthusiastic audience (the "save the show and bring it to Netflix" petition is already over 80,000 signatures!). Ambivalent though I am about the changes the show might make in a possible season three (especially after all of this; I can't think of a single show off the top of my head that got better after being dropped by its network and picked up elsewhere, and a number of shows that got markedly worse) I would of course be over the moon if it actually did get picked up somewhere, on Netflix or a cable network or something.

Comments

[madripoor_rose]

Yeah, I've been keeping an eye out and the season one dvds aren't hitting the resale market either...at least in the local shop/Barnes & Noble.

So I'm wondering how well it sold...seems to show that only diehard fans bought the dvd and not the casual viewer/random pickups that tend to get dumped after a couple viewings.

[sholio]

It's hard to believe it could've sold that well! It's overpriced for an 8-episode miniseries, on top of only being available on Amazon. I doubt there are very many copies circulating. Frustrating and sad.

[recessional]

I think another thing about it is that it's also very much about old-school pulp plotlines, spies and Super New Tech, etc.

It's one of the reasons it didn't work for me, tho one of these days when I have more mental energy I need to go back and watch it and pretend it's, like, an AU leading to a totally different future than the movies try to portray - because it's so pulpy and wants to have all that stuff it doesn't fit with the universe (for me) that leads us to Iron Man so I was having Cognitive Dissonance too much. Which I'm sad about, which is why I need to go back and try it thinking of it Firmly As AU now that I've totally broken up with future MCU stuff in any case, because if it had been an independent show it would have been, if not catnip, at least excellent cake.

But pulp-stuff like that is also its own specific audience. And yeah ABC clearly wasn't in it. While I agree totally with the "things getting picked up later tend to be worse", I feel like stuff like Netflix is the right choice for what mainstream sees as "niche" shows (even when they turn out to be not-so-niche-after-all), at least for now, because they seem much more inclined to just . . . TRY THINGS. And stuff. *articulate*

[sholio]

Yeah, I definitely get where you're coming from here.

For me, the pulp-spy vibe was one of its selling points, because I like that stuff and for me, these days, the TV shows are mainly where it's at -- I like how each of them has its own feel and they more or less stand alone without needing the movie 'verse for context. But I also think reading comics for all these years has made it easier for me to compartmentalize different storylines in the same universe, since every time you change creators the characterization and continuity changes, and it's also not uncommon for individual comics series to have their own unique vibe that don't quite mesh together ("this is a legal drama in a superhero universe", "this is a screwball comedy in a superhero universe", "this is a gritty urban drama in a superhero universe", etc). In some sense I think I kinda AU it in my head while I'm watching anyway, the same way I do with fanfic.

But the series really does wander off in its own direction. There's really no plausible way that you can get from a 1940s with flying cars, laser guns, and pocket-sized WMDs to a modern world that's more or less the same as our own ... which we've seen in the movies, so we know it does go there, as opposed to being able to just take the 1940s world on its own.

And, yeah, it's a different audience. I wonder if the show would've done better if it had existed on its own merits, as a 1940s pulp spy show, rather than being tied to a franchise that's very unlike it. I'm also thinking about other examples like Stargate, where the creators tried a dark'n'gritty spinoff after doing 15 years of light fluffy space-opera adventure, and it flopped hard -- not because it was bad (on its own merits, it was a pretty good show, though too dark to be my personal cup of tea) but just because it was SO different from its predecessors but still had the same franchise name attached. New viewers who might have been into serious, BSG-esque sci-fi didn't check it out because of the Stargate name, and viewers who liked the lighter shows in the franchise weren't up for something darker.

[recessional]

Yeah what I was kind of sad about is that for the first two phases the movies managed to do that for me - to have these different genres plausibly happening in the same universe. And I think Agent Carter COULD HAVE, with more care on the part of the writers, been plausible in and of itself still?

But not quite so much with where they DID go, which actually looks pretty awesome, but yeah with the flying cars and the . . . yeah.

Which is why I hope when I have brain I will be able to go "so this is the AU where somethingsomething laserguns different history hey let's even speculate about where it all ended up!" and enjoy it. (I just have no brains yet.)

And yeah I've been thinking of this in context with SGU too, v much - like my bff loved it because it took the parts of SG:A that did interest her and took out the goofy/ludicrous parts that she Tolerated and replaced them with crunchy bits she liked, but it turned out a lot of the audience that veered towards the SG franchise LIKED the goofy, and yeah others steered clear.

And in that context thinking about ST: DS9 and how the first couple seasons really aren't that different from previous Trek franchises and it GETS crunchier and darker from there - but it v much starts out being A Trek Show before growing into its own, and I think they did that at least somewhat on purpose. (And of course weren't hampered as AC kind of was by trying to say "and then somehow we got the world of Iron Man out of this" - the Federation-verse future was wide open.)

[kore]

I admit I was (and am) so in love with Peggy Carter and Hayley Atwell I would have watched "The Underwater Basket-Weaving Adventures of Agent Carter And Her Mermen Commandos". I didn't grow up a comics fan, but I think reading fanfic since 2000 or so helped -- especially the reason I went looking for fanfic in the first place ("have people written stories that show Spike and Buffy as really hot rather than horrible and depressing?" YES, REALLY). And the show was such a kind of joyous love letter to early comics and fun pulp serials, plus feminism, plus PEGGY, it made me happy.

But yeah one thing that was daaaark all through it, although never really addressed, was that Peggy (and Howard's) big triumph, the founding of SHIELD -- I think they said they were building up to that one-shot as the end of her story -- and yet in the MCU SHIELD is presented as being rotten from the beginning, a la Operation Paperclip. And it's not just that SHIELD was infiltrated by evil, it's that it was able to be infiltrated by evil, that its very existence after a while led to the point where you could no longer tell the two sides apart. That's pretty grimdark, and it's le Carre territory. Steve wasn't around for the Cold War, or the interventionist sixties and exploitive seventies and the horrible mess after the breakup of the USSR, but Peggy would have been in the thick of all of it. (Except SHIELD is "not-CIA," which just kind of further complicates it.)

And apart from being super depressing re Peggy, those are just two TOTALLY different genres and they don't match up at all. But again I was just so into Peggy the "I don't care, this is awesome" switch in my brain got thrown.

[chelseagirl]

What you're saying about audience makes so much sense. I was an avid Mad Men watcher (hmm, the two Peggys have to overcome quite a lot in their respective male-dominated offices . . . ), and though I haven't watched The Americans, it's on my list. Also, I love quite a few shows set in WWII & the post war 40s/50s: Foyle's War, Bomb Girls, The Bletchley Circle, Grantchester, The Hour . . . even Call the Midwife.

They are not on ABC, they are mostly British, and they are targeted at a very different audience than the MCU audience. Admittedly, Agent Carter has a different feel than they do -- as recessional says, it's pulpy. But there's still a lot of overlap in what draws me to both. Actually, the Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries audience is the Agent Carter audience, in many ways.

I enjoy the MCU movies quite a lot (and am *finally* seeing Civil War tomorrow, now that final grades are in and I can breathe for a few moments . . . ), but only Agent Carter and Jessica Jones are really my fandoms. I'm much more interested in the character-driven aspects than in fights, chases, and explosions. The portion of the audience who was watching primarily for those are the ones who dismissed Agent Carter as "boring."

[kore]

Anyway, I'm still blown away at how good this show is. It's such a perfect, perfect little piece of television

I adore it, it's such a gem. I snapped up the DVD as soon as it was available. I think you're right that it was marketed wrong (comedy period pulp-ish adventures, not superhero stuff) and the accessibility was really choked off, I think because of the Amazon-only DVD deal -- this is the kind of show that thrives on being discovered on places like Netflix, either streaming or with DVDs. People aren't going to want to buy the digital eps individually unless they're already fans, just like you say.

People also were unhappy the DVDs were available ONLY from Amazon -- that also happened IIRC with S1 of Agents of Shield. I don't know exactly why or how that happened, but I think it hurt sales a little. I think that also might make people more inclined to hang onto their DVDs, because for a while there was only one place to get them.