Marvel has been at the forefront of the entertainment industry for the past decade, releasing the biggest blockbusters and perfecting the cinematic universe format. Their latest endeavor has been television, specifically their film-like miniseries on Disney Plus. WandaVision and The Falcon and the Winter Soldier have been generally well-received, but have both garnered a bit of criticism for things like pacing.
Television isn't new ground for Marvel, as they've had successful shows like Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and the Netflix Marvel shows (such as Daredevil and Jessica Jones) in the past. However, the Disney Plus shows are an attempt to merge the production levels of MCU movies with the medium of television, specifically to give the audience time to sit with and explore the characters in ways the movies simply don't have time for. The problem with this is that the Disney Plus shows end up feeling more like 6-hour movies that are split up into a bunch of smaller pieces, rather than shows that were specifically written to take advantage of the way that television works.
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It would be one thing if they dropped the series all at once like many streaming services do because it would allow the viewer to binge all of the episodes at once as though they are actually watching a 6-hour movie. However, Marvel has been releasing episodes on a week-to-week basis, which signifies that they clearly want the experience of viewing the series to feel like classic television, where you get one episode a week. It also gives the audience time to obsess over details and speculate about what comes next, which is frequent in the MCU fandom. The problem with this approach is that Marvel has not been structuring these TV shows in the way that most television is structured, and are leaning very heavily into that "6-hour movie" feeling.
The week-to-week approach works better in a show like WandaVision, which is clearly supposed to be paying homage to those classic television tropes, and the weekly release schedule works for the subject matter. WandaVision also had better pacing because each episode really felt more episodic, like there was a contained story within the episode that also added to the overarching plot of the season. The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, on the other hand, really doesn't feel like it was written to be a TV show at all. It's much less episodic in nature, with a lot of the payoffs coming at the very end of the series rather than the end of each episode. Again, this might work fine if the show was released all at once, but it creates a lot of pacing issues when the show is released over the course of 6 weeks.
Clearly, Marvel is trying to pioneer something new with the Disney Plus shows, and they have been marketing them as extended movies - the same production value and feel of an MCU movie, but with more time spent with the story and characters. It's a good model, and works in theory, but their execution hasn't quite been perfected yet. Marvel transferring what they've done with their movies to the small screen is such an exciting concept, but they can't just take exactly what they've done with the movies and move it to a different medium with very few tweaks because film and TV are fundamentally different (even if the quality of TV has definitely reached more of a movie level over the past several years).
In the future, Marvel needs to put more effort into actually taking advantage of and embracing television as a form of media, even in shows that are not explicitly about TV in the way that WandaVision was. If all they're going to do is make 6-hour long movies, why even move to TV in the first place? Movies and TV have different writing structures for a reason, and trying to write a TV show like you'd write a movie is going to lead to tons of problems, specifically with the pacing of each episode.
The Falcon and the Winter Soldier had a lot of criticism lobbed at its pacing, because it set up a lot of storylines that did not get paid off until the end, and each episode just added more questions and suspense without really resolving issues. They could have improved this by trying to write the show more episodically.
It also would have been better to have a few more episodes in the season in order to flesh out all of the storylines they set up, because there ended up being too many for such a short run. They clearly seem to be setting up for a second season in the finale of the show, so perhaps they should have saved one of the main storylines or villains for the future, if they planned on taking the show farther. It seems strange that a lot of the MCU Disney Plus shows are marketed as single-season affairs, because again, what's the point of moving to TV if they're not going to take full advantage of the opportunities that gives them?
Obviously, with the shows that have already released or are coming out in the near future, Marvel filmed them all around the same time and wasn't aware of what the public response was going to be, so some more of their early shows might continue to fall into this trap. Hopefully, in the future, the MCU Disney Plus shows use the medium of TV to their advantage and don't just ignore the potential in favor of doing what they've always done on film. They could really break some new and interesting ground if they eventually manage to strike the balance between the feel of a movie and the structure of the TV show.
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