One Thing I Like About Agatha All Along and also a bonus thing

I could tell that I had hit my over-saturation point with promotional material for Agatha All Along when I was watching an interview with Aubrey Plaza. The interviewer mentioned Patti Lupone, and I said — out loud, even though I was alone in the room at the time — “Oh, what are you going to say? That they lived together? That they were roommates? Oh, what fun! What an unlikely pair, huh? I bet there are some zany stories that came as a result of that, I tell you!”

And I felt bad, because they seem like fine people, and it’s not their fault that YouTube and Instagram have spent years honing in on my interests to such a degree that I’m now getting practically nothing besides ads for and interviews about the series, all the time, on every possible channel. And it’s not their fault that Disney is so eager to promote the series. But what it does is really drive home the inescapable fact that the show is product.

As is every piece of commercial art. It feels like a weirdly Generation X fixation to always look for the exact point when “art” becomes “commerce,” when the reality is that they’ve always been inseparably entangled. It’s just especially noticeable with something like Agatha All Along, which is not only a spin-off series, but part of a 14-year-old, multi-billion dollar multimedia franchise. The MCU has programming slots to fill, whether or not you’ve got a groundbreaking new idea to fill it with.

That all sounds like a cynical, damning-with-faint-praise set-up, but the truth is that I’ve been enjoying Agatha All Along, and I’m pleasantly surprised. I loved WandaVision, and it’s still one of my favorite television series of all time, so I was predisposed to like the spin-off, but I was also predisposed to hold it to an impossibly high standard. From what I’ve seen so far — at the time I’m writing this, I’ve seen the first three episodes — it’s not particularly groundbreaking, but it is engaging and clever TV with a bunch of outstanding actors. Which as I understood it, was the whole point of the MCU on television.

If I had to rate them — and isn’t that the point of having a nerd blog anyway? — then I’d put Agatha All Along as my third favorite of the Disney+ series, behind WandaVision and Ms Marvel. I reserve the right to bump it up if they really surprise me with the later episodes.

The thing I like the most is the format of the whole first episode (which isn’t a spoiler, since it was in the trailer). As a spin-off of WandaVision, and carrying on the story from that series’s finale, it repeats the gag of a fake television series, complete with its own credits sequence. This one is a parody of Mare of Easttown, which I haven’t seen, but I’ve still seen enough to know that it’s ripe for parody. I loved that everybody played it so straight, and that it was full of details down to the accents, like a body found by the “wooter,” just outside the “crick.”

Mostly I love that they used the gag exactly the right amount. It’s carrying on from WandaVision, but not just repeating a gag the audience is already familiar with without adding anything. It’s flipping the idea from that series, where the audience is trying to pick apart the intrigue, to one where everyone except the main character knows exactly what’s happening. It sets the tone, establishing that this isn’t a sitcom but a mystery. And it establishes that this series is going to be full of metatext and self-awareness.

I think that’s also carried on in the closing credits, which is the other thing I really like about Agatha All Along. To start with, they’re really well done artistically, feeling like the best outlet for the series to assert its creativity and personality. And they’re a collection of witchy images, not just in-universe photos and clippings, but from TV series and cartoons — perfect for a metatextual series that is as much about pop culture as it is about comic book adaptations.

I’ll be interested to see what, if any, the overall theme of Agatha All Along turns out to be. WandaVision was about grief. The Falcon and the Winter Soldier was about patriotism and nationalism, especially for African Americans defending a country full of injustice towards them. Ms Marvel was about the experiences of Muslim immigrants in the US, and teaching Americans about the Partition of India and Pakistan. Even Hawkeye was about survivor’s guilt. The risk of MCU series would be to have audiences asking “why does this need to exist?” and having no answer other than “we’re doing phase 5 now.”

I love that Agatha All Along is already playing around with the themes of pop culture storytelling introduced in WandaVision, and adding in swirls of ideas about feminism, women’s relationships with and responsibilities to each other, and a little bit of Wizard of Oz-inspired modern mythology.