WandaVision has marked a new direction for Marvel Studios in several respects. Not only is it their first project to be released in 18 months, but it’s also the first installment of Phase 4 , the first MCU series on Disney+, and the first Marvel project to explore the sitcom genre in any way. Marvel's latest has garnered plenty of positive critical with its first four entries, and that trend seemingly has no sign of slowing down.
However, the show is operating on a weekly episode release format, an approach that’s garnered criticism from some Marvel fans mainly due to the relatively slow pace of the early episodes.
MARVEL'S MINDSET
Series showrunner Jac Schaeffer discussed the reasoning behind the episode layout in a recent interview with The Playlist , revealing that the creators of WandaVision didn’t even know the method by which the show would be released. When asked about fans becoming upset about the weekly release schedule as opposed to a full-season drop, Schaffer said:
“When we were early, early working on [‘WandaVision’], it wasn’t known what the rollout would be. So, the question was less about the binge-ability or dropping them weekly, it was more about how long can we keep the sitcom gig going? How much to reveal about the larger mystery? How much will be in the MCU space versus how much will be in the authentic sitcom space? That was always a question. And a concern, really. But we were all very unified in seeing how far we can take it. And if we could truly create a sitcom featuring [Wanda and Vision].”
KEEPING WANDAVISION FANS ON THEIR TOES
It’s nice to know that even though WandaVision ’s production team didn’t know how the series would be delivered to audiences, they were asking themselves how long they should spend on certain elements of the series before shaking things up. It certainly seems that the latest episode, “We Interrupt This Program”, brought a nice change of pace to the series at just the right time for many fans.
The first three episodes mostly play out along the lines of how a typical sitcom would, spanning different eras of TV. Each of them pepper a little more mystery and creepiness as they progress, but not nearly as quickly as many Marvel fans have grown accustomed to.
This fourth episode, however, not only showed viewers what was going on from an outside perspective, but also caught them up to speed with some characters working to figure out exactly what’s happening in Westview, including Jimmy Woo (last seen in 2018’s Ant-Man and the Wasp ), Darcy Lewis (last seen in 2013’s Thor: The Dark World ), and Monica Rambeau, who was actually in the previous two episodes going by the name of “Geraldine”. It was only this episode in which fans got to catch up on Rambeau's life between the events of Captain Marvel and WandaVision .
Now that both “sides” of WandaVision have been shown, fans can likely expect more frequent switches between the two styles when new episodes of the series hit Disney+ every Friday through March 5.
