TV Review: WandaVision Premiere

WandaVision Episodes 1 & 2: “Filmed Before a Live Studio Audience”, “Don’t Touch That Dial”

Director: Matt Shakman

Starring: Elizabeth Olsen, Paul Bettany, Kathryn Hahn, Teyonah Parris, Jolene Purdy, Emma Caulfield Ford, Asif Ali, Debra Jo Rupp, David Lengel, Amos Glick

Rating: TV-PG

Runtime: 61 minutes

Elizabeth Olsen’s Wanda Maximoff has had a rough go of it during her time in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.  When she was introduced in Avengers: Age of Ultron she was, like most superheroes, already an orphan, and in that movie, her twin brother Pietro and many of her fellow Sokovians were killed by the robotic villain Ultron, who Wanda and Pietro had briefly worked alongside. While trying to redeem herself by working with the Avengers in Captain America: Civil War, Wanda saved Steve Rogers from a suicide bomber but accidentally deflected the explosion into a building, killing several innocent civilians.  This led her to be detained by the U.S. government without trial (twice) and when Steve broke her and her teammates out of prison she became a fugitive.  At the start of Avengers: Infinity War she had found some peace with her android boyfriend Vision (Paul Bettany) but eventually had to kill him in an attempt to stop Thanos’ genocide that ultimately wound up being futile when the villain reversed time and killed Vision again, by ripping the Infinity Stone that powered him out of his head.  Wanda was erased from existence by Thanos’ snap but while she returned five years later thanks to Bruce Banner, Vision was not so lucky. Through all this Wanda has shown admirable resilience but it seems like she’s finally hit something of a breaking point and did what a lot of us do when it all gets to be too much: she got lost in TV.

At least that’s what I think is going on in WandaVision, the MCU’s first television series produced for Disney+.  The series sees Wanda and a somehow-alive Vision, now married, living an idyllic life in a suburb called Westview, and is stylized to recall classic sitcoms. As their lives go on the show imitates series from past decades but something sinister is definitely going on and there is evidence that they are trapped in some kind of television-like world with the implication being that Wanda is subconsciously aware of and manipulating reality. This unique and mysterious premise makes the show easily the most stylistically distinct MCU story yet and a perfect way to launch both Phase 4 and the franchise’s use of television, in addition to films.

The two-episode premiere, filmed almost entirely in black and white, covers the show’s tributes to 50’s and 60’s television.  The simply-titled “Episode 1” seems to draw most of its influence from The Dick Van Dyke Show while the second installment is a clear tribute to Bewitched.  After a cheery title sequence, the former begins with Wanda and Vision struggling to remember why they have the current date marked with a heart on their calendar.  When Wanda meets corny neighbor Agnes (Kathryn Hahn) the two figure it must be her and Vision’s anniversary and begin planning a romantic evening to celebrate.  While at work, at a job the purpose of which he can’t recall, Vision is reminded by his boss, Mr. Hart (Fred Melamed) that he and his wife are coming over to Vision’s house for dinner that evening so Hart can assess whether Vision deserves a promotion. This leads to a comedy of errors as Vision must first fob off Wanda’s inappropriate greetings and dress as aspects of her Sokovian heritage before the two of them must improvise a meal for four without getting caught using their powers.  The dinner scene quickly moves from goofy to tensely frightening when, after demanding to know why Wanda and Vision don’t know anything about the history of their marriage, Hart begins choking and Wanda commands a hesitant Vision to save him, even though he must use his phasing powers to do so.  As it ends the camera pans out to reveal a mysterious figure (in color) watching the “show” of Wanda and Vision’s lives on a computer monitor.

“Episode 2” features Wanda’s uncomfortable first meeting with the town’s queen bee, Dottie (Emma Caulfield), and Vision becoming intoxicated when he gets gum stuck in some of his machine parts, leading to several close calls in which the couple’s powers are nearly exposed during a talent show.  It ends with Wanda suddenly far into pregnancy and with a transition to color.  Also included are several more foreboding incidents hinting at whatever the supernatural conspiracy is, including one in which Wanda seems to take control of the narrative and change it to a more desirable outcome after she and Vision encounter someone in a strange costume that looks like a cross between a beekeeper uniform and a hazmat suit, and another in which a voice out of a radio asks Wanda “who’s doing this to you?”

Although satisfying to watch themselves, these episodes are really just pieces of a puzzle that likely encompasses the entire show, so it’s difficult to critique them properly on their own.  The writing, in particular, can’t be fully judged until we know how the mysteries and narrative arcs introduced here conclude.  That said, the writers can be commended for making the episodes both fitting tributes to the sitcoms they’re referencing while also being genuinely funny to a modern audience and balancing the disparity between the comedic bits and the suspenseful ones, which are much darker in tone.

The cast and crew are much easier to assess and they all deserve a ton of praise.  Olsen and Bettany are on fire throughout and make for a perfect starring couple.  The broad, old-fashioned humor required of them is very different from the type of acting used in their past Marvel films, especially in Olsen’s case, as Wanda has never been one of the funnier Avengers.  But they both adapt seamlessly, bringing out new facets of their character’s personalities while maintaining the same core attributes.  Wanda alternates between being bemused at Vision’s and others’ antics and showing off her own playful side and Olsen knows exactly which moments to underplay and which ones to ham up.  She would have been a Golden Age star if she was born a few decades earlier.  Bettany proves to be game for even the most outrageous of slapstick and delivers it with the amusing abandon of a silent film actor.  Hahn is also a natural fit for the sitcom bit.  There’s clearly more than meets the eye with Agnes (her referring to Wanda as “the star of the show” is telling) but before we find out what that is she also makes for a great supporting player that draws a lot of laughs.  Given the sitcom idea, the visual style is extremely important to the show, to the point that it’s almost a character within itself.  Obviously the black and white is unusual for a Marvel property but the crew goes far beyond that in replicating the style of the shows WandaVision‘s based on.  Wanda and Vision’s powers are mostly depicted through camera tricks and editing and what little VFX there are intentionally simplistic and shoddy.  And while Marvel films rely mostly on acting and dialogue, these episodes feature impressive visual storytelling.

The best example of this is during Mr. Hart’s choking incident.  The majority of WandaVision is shot to match the appearance of the sitcoms it’s inspired by, using a three-camera setup and almost all medium shots.  This makes it appropriately startling when it switches to a more modern single-camera setup with intimate close-ups and less static angles.  This adds greatly to the shattering of the pleasant illusion of the show’s reality that the scene presents and is replicated by the latter scenes in which the wrongness of the scenario becomes apparent.  The acting is also vital in the choking scene.  In the beginning, Mrs. Hart (Debra Jo Rupp) is playfully telling her husband to “Stop it!” in reference to his pestering Wanda and Vision about their past but once he falls over her voice becomes increasingly desperate as she pleads with her husband, and then, seemingly, Wanda, to stop his suffering.  When delivering Wanda’s grave command to “Save him, Vision,” Olsen drops the artificial sitcom glee and the regular Wanda the viewer’s gotten to know over the years, and the conflict and pain she feels at abandoning the façade shines through (it also helps that her voice returns to its regular tone, rather than the higher pitch she uses when playing the perfect housewife).  The scene with the beekeeper is similarly striking.  It’s the only scene in either episode set both outdoors and at night and the shadows are perfectly ominous and much more cinematic than the regular sitcom lighting.  Really all of the scenes hinting at what’s really going on are excellent and recall David Lynch’s works, specifically Twin Peaks, for the way in which they bring supernatural dread to a “regular” All-American neighborhood.

WandaVision wasn’t originally meant to be the start of Phase 4. Before the pandemic started the Black Widow movie was set to lead off the Phase and The Falcon and the Winter Soldier was going to be the first Disney+ series. And while not having any new MCU content (other than Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., the canon status of which is in question) the entire year was one more awful thing about 2020, the shift to having WandaVision mark the franchise’s return works in its favor. It’s undoubtedly the franchise’s most daring stylistic departure, which should help refute the complaint about all Marvel stories being the same and its loving tribute to television history is a powerful declaration that the television medium will be much more important to the future of the MCU than it has been in the past.  It’s also just pretty great. Welcome back, MCU.  You have another winner on your hands.

Notes:

• One of the best aspects of the whole sitcom bit is the inclusion of in-show commercials that allude to Wanda’s past, and, possibly, future by referencing various Marvel characters and concepts. The Stark-brand toaster advertised in the first episode beeps repetitively, which may be a reference to the Stark Industries weapon that almost killed Wanda and Pietro when they were children. And the Strucker watch with a Hydra logo shown in the second refers to Baron Strucker, the Hydra head whose experiments with the Mind Stone gave Wanda and Pietro their powers.
• When Dottie says “The devil is in the details,” during her tirade to the talent show planning committee, Agnes mutters “That’s not the only place he is,” which many believe might be a hint towards an appearance by Mephisto, who is essentially Marvel’s Satan and has ties to Wanda in the comics.
• It may mark the start of a new era for Marvel TV but the show also bears similarities to two of the best of the past series.  Like Jessica Jones, it’s about an immensely powerful female superhero but is more interested in her recovery from trauma (again, if I’m right about what’s going on), and uses surreal imagery and style to reflect its lead’s damaged emotional state as Legion did.