OK, I'm going to say it, despite knowing that at least one social-media-powerhouse friend disagrees: I like "Marvel's Agents of Shield." A lot.
It's full of humanity in a Chekovian way: the humor is often the natural output of a character's frailty -- even more commonly, it's the natural result of the combination of several characters' frailties -- and all the while the sympathetic (I know not all of you!) audience is left with a hole in the heart for the pain the same frailty causes and inevitably will cause. The Whedon family team again picks apart the genres it has been handed; I wonder how much of that is inherent in, and automatically flows from, their assumption of non-religion and gender equality where our inherited definitions of genre include, at some level, old Western Civ religious tropes (and end-games) and extreme gender-inequality. (Sometime maybe I'll talk about the convention we are all taught in school defines "a story" -- preposterously masculinized and totally therefore derogatory toward many forms of story-communication, especially in academic settings.) I continually wonder, watching this show, how many people at Marvel really understand what they have done in handing such a culturally subversive and revolutionary set of writers a substory that is deliberately supposed to question their own superhero genre.*
Last week I realized how satisfying it was to watch Coulson, the equivalent of a single parent with several children, trying to subtly and quietly assess a personal health/growth/identity crisis over the season's arc ... I'm sure some people are very grumpy as being "dragged along," but you know what? That's how it really *works.* Diagnosis and healing are hard to come by when your time is spent being The Grownup(/the leader). I am appreciating watching the gradual, increasingly both inescapable and incredibly fundamental, pain of Coulson's mental processes. Holy crap, the questions he is dealing with, most of which are acted but unstated! (I am glad I saw the Avengers movie, which definitely adds interpretive layers to my experience.)
* I also think "Marvel's The Runaways" (you have to look for it under "M" instead of "R" at bookstores, seriously : P ) was one of the most stunningly honest breakaway-but-stay-within comic series I've read (particularly I love Wolverine's occasional savvy appearances; but then Wolverine is such a writable character :) ); it carries some of the same "but wait, the moral issues surrounding this whole superhero thing actually almost completely suck for everyone involved" idea-set, but avoids the hubris of the Superman and Batman workovers. Because if heroes exist, the rest of us have still only got our lives to live.
(All of which makes me sound like I read a lot more comics than I do. Actually I mostly read DC, and mostly in the 80s.)
So anyhow, so far so good, *I* think. There is lots of good set-up so far, and interesting below-the-super-radar-but-genre-appropriately-still-super-ridiculous plots, and dialogue and characters I love to listen to. I am interested in where this writing team takes this media opportunity.
And Clark Gregg is anchoring the show so intensely, and the three younger characters are totally believable, and if the two intermediate agents aren't fully believable, that's because they are starting as declared successes from the comic-book world of SHIELD ... and I expect they will probably follow Coulson as he steps back into being a full, independently-thinking human again (or they won't be able to last on the team, psychologically). I think "Nick Fury" set Coulson up on purpose, but I wonder whether SHIELD (and Marvel) will be comfortable with the results.
I'm excited :).
