I was losing faith in superheroes. We all were. Just look at the box office where stories with new characters like Madame Web and The Crow are bombing. And even superheroes who shot to stardom in the last few years are floundering. Joker: Folie à Deux flopped despite the fact that its predecessor made $1 billion worldwide. Even Venom: The Last Dance had a mediocre opening weekend, failing to top either of its previous installments.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]Marvel Studios, the longtime leader in the cinematic superhero space, is no exception. Last year, I and many other cultural critics bemoaned the demise of the MCU after 2019’s Avengers: Endgame. The studio was churning out mediocre television series on Disney+ while its films, The Marvels and Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, fell far short of expectations in theaters.
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To its credit, Marvel Studios did produce the only superhero hit of 2024: Deadpool & Wolverine. But as that film frequently reminds its audience, Disney had to drag a 56-year-old Hugh Jackman out of retirement and bring his character Wolverine literally out of the grave in order to make the splashy movie. After spending the last five years trying to sell its audience on new character, Marvel seems to have all but given up.
Instead they’re resurrecting old power players. Robert Downey Jr. will return to the MCU not as Iron Man but Fantastic Four villain Doctor Doom in future Avengers films. Disney and Sony finally seem to have secured a reticent Tom Holland for a fourth Spider-Man movie. Even on TV, Disney+ biggest superhero show of 2025 will be Daredevil: Born Again, a semi-reboot of the popular Netflix series that debuted its last season way back in 2018.
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In the midst of this superhero crisis came Agatha All Along, a bewitching show that ought to be the model for Marvel TV—and, why not?—Marvel movies going forward. A WandaVision spinoff featuring the most marginal of characters in Marvel’s toy box, Agatha was a fun Halloween diversion that ended up revealing some deep emotional truths, much like its predecessor.
The show, which like WandaVision was created by Jac Schaeffer, at first seemed to be explicitly designed not for fans of Marvel but fans of witches. It made the best use of its enchanting leads Kathryn Hahn and Aubrey Plaza who flirted with one another over corpses. Hahn’s villainous Agatha formed a coven and began to wander down a dark, twisted version of the Yellow Brick Road. Each episode involved some sort of test the witches had to overcome, and a costume change with it. It may not have clearly connected to the larger MCU but who cared!
And then something interesting happened. In the back half of the season, Agatha All Along turned its attention away from a fun but ultimately shallow premise and dedicated each episode to a specific character. Suddenly, Agatha cracked open and revealed its depths.
The show’s protagonist, it turned out, was not Agatha all along but Billy Maximoff, played with impressive nuance by Joe Locke. For anyone who missed WandaVision (and you were probably very confused by the last few episodes of Agatha if you did), here’s a brief summary: Wanda Maximoff is a very powerful witch who, after losing her lover Vision, created a fantasy world. In it, she and a very much alive Vision live together in a cozy suburb behind a white picket fence with twin children, Tommy and Billy. Eventually, it is revealed that Wanda is mind-controlling the entire town to play-act her fantasy and avoid her grief. She eventually relinquishes her power, and “kills” her imaginary family in the process.
In a late season episode of Agatha All Along, we learn that when Wanda destroyed her fantasy world, the magical Billy survived by finding a nearby body to inhabit: His soul awoke inside a teenage boy named William who had just died in a car accident. Billy’s struggle to sort out his identity as a mystical being while masquerading as a normal teen was surprisingly touching. It reminded me of a much-beloved show in this genre, Buffy, which used horror tropes to explore the complications of growing up.
Another episode was dedicated to Lilia, a witch who lives non-linearly played by the great Patti LuPone. Jumping back and forth in time made for a disorienting episode that helped the viewer finally understand why Lilia appears so “batty” and built sympathy. It’s the sort of character work that helped Lilia’s sacrifice to save the other witches at the end of the episode land with a gut punch rather than a shrug.
In the final two episodes of the series, which aired together on Halloween eve, Agatha finally revealed her origin story. Centuries ago, we see Agatha in labor pleading with the physical manifestation of Death (played by a giddy Aubrey Plaza) to buy time for her dying son. Death, her ex-lover, grants her some time but warns that neither mortal can outrun their ultimate fate. When Death eventually takes the boy, Agatha fears meeting her son in the afterlife and does everything she can to avoid her own demise.
Agatha runs a centuries-long con in which she convinces other witches that they can gain powers by walking down a made-up path called the Witch’s Road (the setting of the whole series) in order to steal their powers and live forever, thus outrunning her eventual confrontation with her child in the afterlife. It’s only after Billy accidentally creates a fantasy of the Witch’s Road—much like his mother created her delusion of suburban life—that a coven actually walks the dangerous path.
The last episodes are full of twists: The road was not real; Billy becomes the superhero Wiccan; Agatha sacrifices herself and returns as a ghost; Billy is able to find a body to place his twin brother Tommy’s soul. (Mercifully, the show spared us Tommy stunt casting.)
But the greatest trick of Agatha All Along is that the show used its extended time on the small screen to make us empathize with Agatha and Billy. When Billy and Agatha’s ghost set out to find Tommy, we’re not just excited to watch another random fetch quest. We’re invested in Billy’s emotional journey as he reunites with his family.
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When WandaVision premiered in January of 2021, it was something of a miracle. The first Disney+ show in the Marvel Cinematic Universe did not resemble the movies that preceded it. Each episode riffed on a different era of sitcom—from Bewitched to Modern Family. But Schaeffer was most interested in character development. Audiences had watched Wanda lose the love of her life in Avengers: Infinity War, but Vision’s death was little more than a footnote in that film. Thanos, Vision’s murderer, doesn’t even remember who Wanda is in the sequel, Avengers: Endgame.
WandaVision took Wanda, one of the only female Avengers, seriously. The series was more interested in her inner turmoil than her powers. That in itself was a gift after Avengers: Endgame staged an eye roll-inducing stunt in which all the female superheroes team up to fight a bad guy for five minutes. (Were the men just taking a breather?) WandaVision gave the character the space and time to struggle with her grief and commit unspeakable acts in the process. It was nuanced. It was fun.
It unfortunately ended in a rather dull CGI battle involving different colored sparks flying from characters’ hands. That commitment to a boring final act presaged a wave of mediocre—alright, abysmal—Marvel shows on Disney+, like The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, Moon Knight and Secret Invasion. Those series were so convoluted and stuffed with McGuffins as to be incomprehensible. What were billed as extended stories that could dig into the souls of characters who hadn’t gotten their due on the big screen failed to make audiences care about these superheroes. A Ms. Marvel TV show, for instance, didn’t send audiences running to The Marvels.
Worse, Wanda fell flat on the big screen in Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness. Director Sam Raimi (who said he never saw WandaVision) ignored much of her development in that show. Her character came across as nothing but a crazed mother willing to murder and maim in order to reunite with her children, a somewhat sexist trope that failed to capture the emotional nuance of the character that had been built on TV.
But with Agatha All Along, the folks at Marvel seem to have realized that Schaeffer has tapped into something few others in the comic book genre have managed. They’re not the only ones. Some actors have noticed audience’s superhero fatigue, and it takes a trusted name like Schaeffer to lure them into these projects. In an interview, Plaza recently told me of her decision to join the MCU, “The Marvel of it all was the least appealing thing about it, because I’m hesitant to become part of that machine.” She was only sold because of Schaeffer’s involvement. “I haven’t seen a lot of Marvel television, but I watched WandaVision, and I felt like, wow, this is transcending the Marvel tropes, and it’s kind of elevated.”
After Agatha All Along, it won’t be surprising if fans were almost as desperate to see Billy on the big screen as Doctor Doom. Schaeffer seems to be one of the few writers working in the superhero realm who understands that emotional revelations are far more compelling than CGI magic. We can only hope that her influence continues to expand.
