ABC Picks Up AGENT CARTER Series, Renews SHIELD
There's good news: ABC has ordered Agent Carter to series. The show is a spin-off from Captain America: The First Avenger and the Agent Carer Marvel One-Shot, and it's going to be a period spy show starring Hayley Atwell. Here's how it's being described:
Set in 1946, it's the story of Peggy Carter's post-WWII work with the covert Strategic Scientific Reserve, as she balances being a single woman in 1940s America, while also going on secret missions for Howard Stark.
Did we see who she married in Captain America: The First Avenger? I don't think we did, so her adventures as a single woman will not be spoiled for us yet. We know he was a soldier, but not even which army!
The official information doesn't mention if Dominic Cooper will appear as Howard Stark, but he's expressed interest. And what about Dum Dum Dugan? Neal McDonough can find the time, right? Also, there's a nice opportunity to bring in Toby Jones as Arnim Zola.
Which, by the way, raises the biggest question about the show in general: we know that SHIELD will fall, and we're watching a show set in the earliest days of the organization when it is first being infiltrated by Hydra. How does the show handle that in a way that doesn't make everyone seem stupid but also doesn't skirt the truth we all know? This seems like a real balancing act, as the 1946 setting makes it 100% a show about the earliest days of SHIELD. Here's hoping they do it well, because between Hayley Atwell and the cool period setting Agent Carter is the most exciting TV news I've heard in a while.
In other less exciting Marvel TV news ABC has renewed Agents of SHIELD for a second seson. The show definitely sucks less lately (I've watched the post-Winter Soldier episodes), but it still really sucks. It sucks in this really specific way, where these boring characters spend five minutes telling each other stuff we've already seen happen in the episode; the last one I watched had people telling each other than Agent Ward (aka Agent Banana Republic) is a Hydra agent no less then five times in one hour. But perhaps now that the show is freed from the boring constraints of being a SHIELD show it'll improve. I'm sure it'll be the same shit, just with the team taking down Hydra cells week after week.
2015 will see at least three, maybe four Marvel Studios TV shows - these on ABC and at least two on Netflix (there will eventually be five Netflix shows, but I believe they're coming in waves). That's astonishing.
