WandaVision (2021)

Arguably, of all the various Avengers characters that have appeared in the printed medium, none have suffered more heartache than Wanda “the Scarlet Witch” Maximoff. She’s lost her husband, her children, been brainwashed, insane, and flipped back and forth between powerful hero to unwitting villain over the decades, and while a popular character especially when paired up with her android lover/husband the Vision, the Marvel movies haven’t really done a whole lot with her despite the casting of the fantastic Elizabeth Olsen as Wanda. Arguably, her MCU counterpart has suffered more than any other Avenger as well.

It is perhaps appropriate that the first actual MCU TV show to actually get to Disney+ then is WandaVision, showing what happened when Wanda Maximoff and the Vision got a place in the suburbs.

WandaVision doesn’t look like a superhero show at first. If anything, it looks like an old sitcom to start. Filmed in black and white and with a laugh track for the first two episodes, even with thirty or so minute runtimes and fake commercials, it doesn’t seem to make a whole lot of sense how this happened, and your mileage may vary as to how funny you find these episodes as they use the same humor as the shows they’re copying. But there’s always a disquieting element in the background, and the series initially provokes more questions than answers like “How is Vision (Paul Bettany) alive again?” and “How did Wanda do that thing she just did if her powers were always limited to telekinesis and telepathy before?” And then, at the end of the second episode the series changes to color and the house Wanda and Vision call home literally goes through a big decor change.

Answers to do come over time, and the series wisely paces them out until the very end. What happened to Westview, New Jersey? What does government agency S.W.O.R.D. want with either Wanda or the Vision? What’s up with Wanda’s wacky neighbor Agnes (the great Katheryn Hahn)? Is that really Pietro/Quicksilver from the Fox X-Men films (Evan Peters) as her brother now? About the only real allies Wanda has outside of Westview are S.W.O.R.D. agent Monica Rambeau (Teyonah Parris), FBI agent Jimmy Woo (Randall Park) and scientist Darcy Lewis (Kat Dennings).

This show seemed to be about perfectly paced. It set the mystery up and then gradually revealed the truth in a way that provoked a lot of online fan theories before showing a lot of them probably weren’t right. The early episodes, when the show openly copied and parodied the sitcoms of various eras perfectly, worked well as the series did capture the look of shows as diverse as The Dick VanDyke Show, Bewitched, The Brady Bunch, Full House, Malcolm in the Middle, Modern Family, and The Office with other influences scattered all over. But this show wasn’t really just trying to copy old sitcoms. Instead, it was really doing a deep dive into one really heartbroken character, namely Wanda Maximoff.

Elizabeth Olsen is a fantastic actress, but so far, the movies haven’t really asked her to do a whole lot. While Paul Bettany also gets a lot of time to shine and I’d watch Katheryn Hahn in just about anything, Olsen is finally pulled in to do more than look hurt and occasionally say stuff in her “now you hear it, now your don’t” faux Slavic accent. This is the Wanda Maximoff fans were probably waiting for, and Olsen nails the role in ways that she always could have before but never got a chance to do. She’s just as comfortable onscreen as a 60s sitcom housewife or a more modern stressed out suburbanite or really just a hurting woman who needs some kind of help. A TV series that allowed for more character growth was really more of what this character needed, saying more in a half-hour fake sitcom about her own mental state than any of the movies would have given her time to do. Whether this is it for WandaVision or it comes back in some other, no doubt different form, we got a good look at a talented actress making the most of a character that wouldn’t have gotten much of a spotlight otherwise. And if that is what Disney+’s MCU work is going to do, Marvel fans like myself will be much the better for it.

Grade: A-