TV Series Review: WandaVision (2021) *Spoiler Free*

TV Series Review: WandaVision (2021) Spoiler Free

Marvel Studios continues the Marvel Cinematic Universe on the small screen with the nine part series, WandaVision, now streaming on Disney+. Initially released weekly during January and February 2021, the entire series is now available to stream with a Disney+ subscription.

Set a few weeks after Avengers: Endgame, superheroes, Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olson) and Vision (Paul Bettany) appear to be living an idealistic life in a black and white 1950’s sitcom. However everything isn’t as it seems in this new reality.

WandaVision is an unusual story about love, loss, grief, and healing told through the lens of witches and superheroes. It’s a fairly original concept with plenty of humor, interesting character development, and quite a few surprises.

I don’t usually review television series, despite watching quite a lot of them through various streaming services, however WandaVision is definitely worth an exception. For me, the series was the closest yet to watching a live action version of a modern comic book come to life.

Quite possibly the shorter episode length combined, with at least five major story threads, kept the writing tight and the pace moving. I was never waiting for something to happen.

Some viewers may find the first three episodes to be a little slow, if you’re more into superhero action, but they really serve to ground the premise of the sitcom world as an actual reality and not just a light hearted magic trick.

While the show is likely infinitely better for fans of the MCU, since it does directly continue events from the films and is filled with Easter eggs, it holds up as a stand alone story. I’ve heard of many people, for who WandaVision is their first MCU story, and they’ve enjoyed it. It hasn’t been a problem for them to follow at all.

Personally I enjoyed the weekly release experience with every episode leaving me wanting more. It was also fun to hear all the fan theories during the week from people way more knowledgeable in the comics that inspired the series.

I’m continuously amazed by comic book readers who proclaim to know the events of future episodes, giving very detailed, blow by blow accounts of how the story will play out… and then it happens nothing like that because the MCU is not a rote retelling of the comics. Sometimes these fans get a little too married to their theories, which is a bit unfortunate.

I’m not that kind of fan. I’ll certainly theorise but the fun for me is watching how plotlines play out as the show creators reveal the story they’re telling. I was very satisfied with each episode and the finale. I look forward to seeing where many of the characters show up in the MCU next.

As the MCU’s proper first TV series I enjoyed seeing a longer story, featuring actual characters from MCU films as the lead characters. This is what Marvel Television should have been all along (Agents of SHIELD could have been so much better if it really was ‘All connected’ with more than just cameos from the occasional secondary characters of the films).

You’ll be hard pressed not to binge watch it if it hooks you in. The first two episodes may leave you wondering what is this, but they’re important to the story, which really begins to pick up by episode three. Especially worth a watch if you grew up on sitcoms. You’ll really appreciate the nostalgia or at least have some fun guessing the sitcom influences.

Did you watch WandaVision? Let me know what you thought in a short sentence or paragraph in the comments below.

Comments

Movie Review: Memory (2023)

S omething a little different for me in terms of movies I usually review, Memory is a film I was invited along to see by my partner, and both of us didn't know much about the movie going in, other than it was a film where one of the leads has dementia. The basic premise follows adult, special needs social worker, Sylvia (Jessica Chastain), who leads a simple and structured life. When Saul (Peter Sarsgaard) follows her home from their high school reunion the surprise encounter profoundly impacts both of their lives. The film starts out very awkward and disjointed to some degree, which I feel is intentional, to reflect that Sylvia, who is also a struggling single mother, is fairly resilient, she is, in many ways, just barely holding everything together because she doesn't have any other option. When Saul sees Sylvia at their high school reunion it seems like some unpleasant memories from her past are fast tracked into the forefront of her life, and things move forward fro...

TV Series Review: The Office - Australia (Prime Video) (2024) No Spoilers

W hile I'm a late comer fan of The Office, only watching after the original and USA versions were both available on streaming services, I did watch them in the order of release i.e. I watched the U.K. version first. Now, with the release of the Australian version of The Office on Prime Video, I think it's best to approach watching this new version understanding that it is not those shows. More importantly, remembering the US version was not well received or as popular as it has become since streaming became a thing. I personally remember people often saying the original version was better, back in the day. Of course, the Australian version has analogues for all the same characters you're familiar with from the previous versions, with their characteristics, so you can easily see who is the Aussie version of each character. While there are actually 13 different adaptations of the series worldwide, I was surprised to learn this is the first time the boss has been female. No...

TV Series Review: Velma (2023-2024) No Spoilers

A s a kid, Scooby Doo cartoons were something I used to watch fairly regularly. I wasn't a diehard fan but it was one of the better, of the many, cartoons I used to watch. I had heard about the new animated series, Velma , around the time of its release but it wasn't coming out on any streaming service I was subscribed to so it went off my radar pretty quickly. Quite by chance I signed up to a streaming service so I could watch DC Entertainment's, The Penguin, and noticed Velma was on that platform. I figured I may as well get my money's worth out of the subscription. I did know that Velma, herself, had been race swapped for the show, which made no real difference to me, though I do prefer classic Velma if pushed to choose. However the first episode of season one was a real shock to my expectations! No where had I heard this series was skewing very much into adult humor and themes. I was expecting something more along the lines of the original Scooby Doo show. Instead I...

Trump's 2024 Election Win Will Change Everything - At Least I Sure Hope It Does!

Trump by Leonardo.ai & TET A s an outsider looking in on the US 2024 election, right up until election day, it is beyond my belief that the election continued to be a 'close race'. It is even further beyond my belief that Trump won, without question. Even if the Democrats wanted to claim the election was rigged somehow (which I'm sure Trump was gearing up to do had the outcome been different) it would be hard to make the case, beyond a recount. There's no slim margin here. Trump clearly won. While I would've preferred a Blue win, I at least got one outcome I was hoping for. A clear winner on election day. If I could give the Democrats some free, unsolicited advice for the next election. Stop targeting the opposition as if they're somehow selfish, evil villains. That's not how political parties work. At the end of the day the all represent the public. The people. The everyday citizen who you're trying to convince that you have what it takes to meet t...

I'm Confused About Why People Prefer to Say Discombobulated?

D iscombobulated. Is a word that I think someone rediscovered about three or four years ago (maybe more because the pandemic years have thrown out my sense of time) and now I hear it a lot. It's not a new word by any means, but when I started hearing multiple celebrities using it in everyday sentences, I actively had to look up what it meant. Define it with as many synonyms as you like but essentially it's just another word meaning 'confused'. Seinfeld Quotes: Quotes.net The words are pretty much interchangeable. He was discombobulated by too many choices. He was confused by too many choices. My confusion is the length of the word. It's unnecessarily long with too many syllables. There are many other words that mean confused, and therefore also mean discombobulated. Most of them are shorter and easier to say. So why not just say 'confused'? Perhaps discombobulated sounds more intelligent, maybe? Hawaii Five-0 Quotes: Quotes.net I've noticed it gets us...

Social Media: It's All Fake News - Even That News You Shared, That Proves the Thing, Because It's Backed Up By a Credible Expert, is Fake.

Social Media profiles need a peer based rating system that locks you out for 30 days if your feed is one long stream of depressing boredom that bums everyone out. I don't watch or read the news anymore (mainstream or otherwise). From time to time, if something filters through that piques my interest, I'll take a bit of a dive to find out more. The recent US election is a good example. I even wrote a few opinion pieces in this blog. The Daily Show Is Not News Note that I don't count The Daily Show as news, because I did watch quite a lot of that during the US election. While they lean quite a bit toward the left overall, it's not a show you look to for context, since much of their humor is based on reframing context to get a laugh. The one thing The Daily Show does well is highlight how both Liberal and Right wing media latch onto one or two bullet point messages each day and run them through the mouths of every on screen commentator like they're all wind up parro...

Movie Opinion: GhostBusters: Frozen Empire (2024) Some Spoilers

T here's one thing that can be said for 2016's, all female Ghostbusters reboot , and that is, it's not anywhere near as bad as Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire . Although you don't realize it almost all the key moments of the actual plot are spoiled in the movie poster shown here. It's a wildly over thought, and overly convoluted story, with much exposition, that boils down to a big end level boss, a beam of light shooting into the sky, all the captured ghosts escaping, and all the Ghostbusters teaming up to clumsily restore order again by the end of the film. Side note: That mayor everyone thinks is a dick is the kind of mayor you want. He really knows how to get things done in record time. I've never seen a building get condemned and the legal tenants get evicted so fast, ever! There's not much here that this franchise hasn't done before, in every film, only this time everything freezes too because... I don't know, I drifted off during that expositio...

TET.Life (The Extraordinary Tourist Life)

Search This Blog