It’s Marvel in a TV Show.
That is enough said really. I love the movies, I really seriously do but they have one major flaw – they are movies. They only last for a couple of hours, if that, and that’s all you get. TV shows equal movie length in 3 episodes and everything after that is just more.
When I really get into something then I want to watch it all the time, but how many times can you rewatch the same movie, or the same set of movies in a short time frame? TV shows are longer, so you can feed the addition, you can fall into that universe for far longer. It’s still never enough, not for me, as once I’ve rewatched a lot then I remember everything and I do hunger for new material. However, once the show has been running a few seasons there’s usually enough episodes that the memory won’t be clear for all of them, and I can scroll through the description and find one that I want to watch.
So Marvel and TV show is enough to make me a fan and two episodes is not enough to form an opinion of the show. I suppose it’s the pilot and one episode which then means even less. Coulson is awesome though, I have been punching the air and screaming “Coulson Lives!” because, it’s Coulson and it’s just awesome.
Clearly they want the show to do well, as I imagine getting Samuel L Jackson in to do just one scene was expensive. It’s really cool though as with Coulson heading up the team, Maria Hill (Cobie Smulders) guest starring in the pilot, and now Samuel L Jackson in the first episode, it really grounds it in the SHIELD we’re familiar with from the movies. It’s a TV show so it has a smaller budget, I’ve spotted the use of CGI to manufacture a few scenes already, whereas in the movies I don’t notice the fakeness.
Some of the episode composition is a bit jarring too. It’s a familiar format but I guess because it’s Marvel, it doesn’t feel like it should read like an NCIS episode, but it does, it beats just the same. I don’t know whether ultimately I’m going to like the show once the “marvel!” thing wears off. I guess it’s showing a normalcy to something that wasn’t normal, all we saw previously were the missions and the heroes, these are just regular agents and you get the normal work too. The SHIELD in the movies is very shiny and I guess it’s Black Widow, Hawkeye, Maria Hill etc. that I remember the scenes of when I think of SHIELD. Coulson is a field agent but obviously in a different department, as much as I really like Coulson he’s not in the same league as the others. I didn’t realise that I was consciously expecting a Black Widow kind of SHIELD until I was disappointed. I guess what I was hoping for was a cross between my favourite bits of Alias and Flashpoint. Top level espionage with a lot of professionalism.
It’s early days yet and it’s the first new TV show that I’ve watched in a long time. I’ve stuck with my old favourites for years, so at least it’s something different. Once I’ve seen more I can post a more indepth review, so until then.
