Bladerunner•

Once again we have another MCU series that places message above everything else. Direction, plot, story, characters, all of those things are secondary to the social commentary.

To begin with, the lead actress (Kathryn Hahn) is just not funny. She overacts constantly, which could be partly due to poor direction, but that excuse only goes so far. Now, Aubrey Plaza is funny and knows how to deliver a good comedic performance, but she's hamstung here by the dismal writing. She just doesn't have anything to work with.

A lot of people have complained about how "woke" it is, but that isn't the issues here, the issue is how poorly it's written and directed. Also, it's crippled from the get-go because it's intrinsically aligned with WandaVision, which started out so promising and exciting and just fell flat on its face. What began as an innovative story with lots of clever ideas and gorgeous production values skidded right off the road and became the same MCU dreck we've all come to abhor.

One thing that is just so tired and has become the earmark of lousy MCU offerings are the song and dance numbers. How in the world did the MCU become a bastion of the musical? Is this really what we want from a comic book series? Do we really want over-the-top musical numbers in our superhero stories? Judas priest, please just stop this now!

Lastly, what is the main problem with Agatha All Along? NO ONE CARES about Agatha. Who is she, how does she fit in to the broader narrative? She doesn't. It's a throwaway character that was introduced in a lousy MCU series that no one cares about. In the comics, where she is a 3rd tier character that serves to ally or support main characters, she is a supportive, older character that operates as a mentor. In the new MCU she is more like a villain and much younger, which just craps on the source material and her established lore. She's not a silly, histrionic, overacting nitwit in the comics. This iteration of Agatha is something the modern MCU conjured out of the ether and she just doesn't matter. No one cares what happens to her and she doesn't factor into any important plot points in the overarching series.

This series is only slightly better than Acolyte, which isn't saying much. It was the 3rd least watched MCU series and will be completely forgotten. It got almost no advertising, which shows what the creators thought about it. I think it was a show that would have been cancelled once Disney and the MCU "woke up" and changed course trying to correct the past 5 years of abysmal content, but it was too far along in the pipeline, so they just soldiered on and decided to release it quietly and let it slither into the forgotten swamp of MCU dreck. One year later, that is exactly what happened and hopefully this will serve as a lesson that there must be a course correction soon or Disney and the MCU are going to be completely destroyed. I don't know if it can be saved, but if Andor is any indication they have a shot. Andor is one of the finest series ever made about Star Wars and certainly the best series made by Disney in the past 5 years. Hopefully we'll get more content like that and garbage like Agatha will be a distant, putrid memory.