WandaVision

 

Following the events of Avengers: Endgame, powerful magic user Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen) and her synthetic human partner Vision (Paul Bettany) have retired to Westview, New Jersey to raise a family. He works an office job, and she tries to keep nosy neighbor Agnes (Kathryn Hahn) from learning their secrets. But their suburban sitcom antics mask many darker truths: a town trapped, the dead brought back to life, and an intelligence director (Josh Stamberg) threatening to escalate the situation. Meanwhile, S.W.O.R.D. captain Monica Rambeau (Teyonah Parris) teams up with FBI agent Jimmy Woo (Randall Park) and scientist Darcy Lewis (Kat Dennings) to get to the bottom of what is going on in Westview.

 

While Marvel’s cinematic offerings are more or less bulletproof, the first Marvel streaming series for Disney Plus represented a huge gamble. WandaVision includes a few requisite flashbacks for the uninitiated, yes, but the series has more resonance for those who have been keeping up with the Avengers film franchise (which last saw the Vision killed off twice in the same movie). Add to that the show’s copious allusions to sitcom tropes, and the amount of prerequisite viewing involved should have made for an audience-shrinking premise. And yet WandaVision proved to be anything but, shooting to the top of many most-watched lists. Unlike last year’s infatuation with Tiger King, however, WandaVision got there largely on merit.

 

Credit series creator Jac Schaeffer for keeping viewers on their toes. While a good chunk of episodes have Agents of S.H.I.E.LD. overtones – plucky team of nerds races to confront growing threat – more than half are odes to sitcoms past, each done in a different style (black and white I Love Lucy/Dick Van Dyke Show homages in the first episode to a mock-Malcolm in the Middle in episode six). These feel like faithful recreations rich in period detail rather than cheap parodies, not surprising given that Olsen’s sisters starred on Full House, director Matt Shakman was a child actor on Just the Ten of Us, and Van Dyke himself gave behind-the-scenes advice. And yet within these sitcom setups, there are moments of intense discomfort, poignance, terror, and tension.

 

These tonal shifts are made plausible by Olsen’s commanding lead performance. She is equally adept at screwball comedy as she is as a woman completely beset by loss and grief. Bettany spends much of his screen time beleaguered and perplexed as he tries to unpack not only what is happening in Westview but his own nature as well. Hahn is one of those performers who elevates everything she appears in, and this is no exception. It helps that there is far more to her character than her first appearance suggests. Only Stamberg as S.W.O.R.D. director Hayward is a letdown as a one-note antagonist.

 

Weird, insular, and occasionally confounding, WandaVision is a creatively bold work of meta-TV bolstered by a cast uniquely suited to the challenge.