Agatha All Along is a testament to creative continuity

*POSSIBLE SPOILERS FOR AGATHA ALL ALONG EPISODES 1-5*

Agatha All Along, the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s (MCU) latest live-action streaming series (and the first under the studio’s new banner of Marvel Television) is just over halfway through its nine-episode run. Starring Kathryn Hahn as the titular witch Agatha Harkness, and created by showrunner Jac Schaeffer, the series has been marketed as a direct spin-off of 2021’s WandaVision, which was also helmed by Schaeffer.

WandaVision was the MCU’s first foray into streaming television, and it proved to be a massive success, garnering widespread critical and audience acclaim (not to mention, 23 Emmy nominations and 3 wins). It makes sense, then, that the studio is keen to emphasize the connective tissue between these two shows, even going so far as to acknowledge it in the tagline for Agatha, which reads: “From the twisted minds that brought you WandaVision.” To my knowledge, this is the first time the MCU has advertised an upcoming property by directly citing its relationship to a previous property in the marketing materials.

This connection isn’t just lip service, however. Along with Schaeffer, multiple members of the WandaVision creative team have returned to lend their talents to Agatha. New writers Giovanna Sarquis, Jason Rostovsky, and Gia King are joined by several WandaVision veterans in the writer's room: Peter Cameron (WandaVision Episodes 5 and 6 co-writer), Megan McDonnell (WandaVision Episode 3 writer and Episode 4 co-writer), Cameron Squires (WandaVision Episode 7 writer), and Laura Donney (WandaVision Episode 8 writer), as well as Laura Monti, who was Schaeffer’s assistant on WandaVision and is now a member of the writing staff for Agatha.

In addition to the returning writers, executive producer Mary Livanos, composer Christophe Beck, and lyricists Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez have all also made the jump from WandaVision to Agatha. The latter pair have once again crafted a collection of original songs for the series, an element previously popularized during the run of WandaVision when nearly every episode received an original theme song (as per the show’s sitcom conceit). In fact, the name of Agatha’s eventual solo series was inspired by her show-stopping solo number that closed out Episode 7 of WandaVision.

There are even a handful of actors from the WandaVision call sheet — aside from just Hahn, of course — that also appear in Agatha. In the opening episode that aired in mid-September, viewers were greeted by a number of familiar faces in WandaVision’s town of Westview, New Jersey. Debra Jo Rupp, David Payton, Emma Caulfield Ford, David Lengel, Asif Ali, and Amos Glick all played residents of the small town that Wanda Maximoff inadvertently warped into her own sitcom reality, and now, three years on, they’re all still living there alongside a magically imprisoned Agatha.

We’re now five episodes into this new series, and as a massive fan of WandaVision (it’s my favorite project — show or movie — that the MCU’s ever created), I couldn’t be happier that Agatha has been so effortlessly carrying on the legacy of the phenomenon that came before it. If I'm being completely honest, I'm also rather relieved — there was a time, not too long ago, when I really didn’t think this show would be able to capture my interest.

When the teaser trailer first came out in July of this year, I wasn’t that sold on it. I’m not a huge fan of witchcraft-based media, I don’t know much about tarot cards or Ouija boards, Halloween is my least favorite holiday, and I really don’t do well with anything objectively “scary” on my TV screen. Right off the bat, it was clear that the gimmick of Agatha wouldn’t be getting me as it had with WandaVision, in which the mere idea of seeing superheroes in sitcoms would have been enough on its own to get me to tune in.

So if the premise of Agatha wasn’t catching my attention, what about the lead character, Agatha herself? Was I invested in seeing her story continue after Wanda reverted her back to a powerless version of her  “nosy neighbor” sitcom persona as a form of punishment and entrapment?

In a word, no.

Sure, I deeply adored Hahn’s performance of the nosy neighbor “Agnes” (later revealed as her true witchy self, Agatha Harkness) in WandaVision, but I also found her characterization a touch one-dimensional at times, and as thus, I wasn’t entirely sure where they could take her in a subsequent nine-episode series. Compared to someone like Monica Rambeau, another WandaVision supporting character with similar screentime to Agatha, the antagonistic witch didn’t have all that much depth (“I take power from the undeserving. It’s kinda my thing.”, she tells Wanda at the top of the final episode), although I now suspect that the decision to hold back on Agatha’s many layers was intentional for the sake of her spinoff show.

However, at the time, this had the unfortunate effect of making me simply not know why I should be invested in Agatha’s story continuing in her own series. The trailers advertised her main motivation for embarking upon the Witches’ Road, which is a gauntlet of magical trials that grants those who successfully complete it whatever they want most, to be a desire to gain her powers back. This goal just sounded so incredibly uninteresting to me from a character standpoint, so much so that I actually refused to believe it.

In the time since the teaser trailer was released, I regularly thought to myself, “Why should I care that Agatha wants her powers back and has to “walk the Witches’ Road” to get them? That is not an interesting goal!” I so desperately wanted the show to make the return of her powers be linked to anything personal or emotional because then I would care. In fact, the only bit of marketing for Agatha that ever really piqued my interest was a brief exchange from the full trailer that came out in August.

“Why do you let them believe those things about you?” asks Joe Locke’s mysterious “Teen” character of Agatha. She responds, “Because the truth is too awful.”, and in my mind, this was the first potential glimpse of a previously unseen emotional core to the show. Five episodes in, we're yet to learn exactly what “those things” are, or what that “awful truth” is, but rest assured, this conversation remains one of the scenes I’m most anticipating in the four episodes to come.

Aside from that one small glimmer of Agatha’s humanity, I still didn’t have much to hang my hat on when it came to being excited about the show. It also didn’t help that the trailers were giving me next to nothing about any of the supporting characters, either. Aside from their names, which I couldn’t usually remember, all I knew about the witches who would be joining Agatha on the Witches’ Road was that they were being played by some actors I wouldn’t have anticipated wanting to join the MCU (Patti LuPone, Aubrey Plaza, Sasheer Zamata, and Ali Ahn).

If you’re keeping track, this meant that heading into the two-episode premiere on September 18th, Agatha had a premise that barely intrigued me, a lead character I liked but certainly hadn’t been desperately awaiting more backstory for, and a coven of supporting characters whose names I couldn’t even keep straight.

In other words, I had no real reason to watch it — so why did I? Why am I even writing this article in the first place?

Well, aside from the fact that I’ve followed the MCU religiously for over a decade at this point, and have previously vowed to always give each new live-action project at least one viewing’s worth of my time, by far the reason I didn’t write Agatha off before seeing it is because of the people who made it.

Do you know all those creatives whose names I cited at the start of this article? It’s entirely because of them, and my faith in their work on WandaVision, that I remained hopeful for Agatha, despite all the evidence to the contrary. 

Even when it felt like there was nothing in the show to really hook me as a viewer, I never, not even for a second, doubted Jac Schaeffer and her team’s ability to pull off something truly spectacular — I just figured it was a me problem. I assumed there was something I was missing, some deeper emotional element I wasn’t yet seeing in the marketing, but that would become apparent as the show unfolded.

Because I so implicitly trusted everyone involved in Agatha, I had a sneaking suspicion that my frustration with being unable to connect with it was entirely rooted in impatience. I didn’t want to be bored by the show, and I certainly didn’t want to hate it — I just hadn’t yet found an element to really reel me in. If anything, I was basically begging Agatha to give me something to like, something to latch onto, because up until its release, there wasn’t much.

Now, halfway through the series, I can say with complete confidence that, yes, I did just need to be patient. It takes literally less than 15 minutes for the show to present a far more compelling character motivation for Agatha, one that had been entirely obscured from the promotional materials. We learn that she once had a son, Nicholas Scratch, who she’d presumably lost at a young age. Even without any further context about this unseen child in the opening episode, I knew instantly that it was the very thing I’d been missing from the show in its lead-up. It was such an immense relief to watch Agatha mournfully look through Nicholas’ bedroom and be reaffirmed that my faith in the “twisted minds” behind WandaVision had not been misplaced.

I say all of this because I think it really highlights the value of striving for true creative continuity in the MCU, a franchise spanning nearly 50 projects in the last 16 years. Trust in the creatives is imperative to the ultimate success of any project, but especially one that’s interwoven into a larger universe, and it’s when this trust is broken that fans start to become disenchanted.

To be fair, there are certainly instances where minimal overlap happens between two projects that share characters or plot points, and/or come one after another in the overall narrative timeline — with as many irons as Marvel has in the fire at any given moment, it’s bound to happen — but that doesn’t mean the stories should suffer as a result. In fact, 2023’s The Marvels is an excellent example of a film that very successfully managed to incorporate key elements from a show, 2022’s Ms. Marvel, that came before it, despite being helmed by an almost entirely different creative team and being in production before the show had been released.

Conversely, when 2022’s Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness basically disregarded and undid most of, if not all, the nuanced character development for Wanda in WandaVision, I was massively disappointed. To this day, I have never rewatched that movie beyond its opening weekend, and I usually just pretend it never even happened. That film was being produced before WandaVision was released on Disney+ in early 2021, but it rather famously had no major creatives in common with the series — the only carryover was Elizabeth Olsen, a.k.a. Wanda herself, and the actors who played Wanda’s twins in the show, Julian Hilliard and Jett Klyne — and believe me, it shows.

In the case of Agatha, given that I already had personal reservations heading into the series, I’m so grateful for all the aforementioned creative continuity with WandaVision. The show is far from finished its run, but it’s so comforting to know that we’re in safe hands with this team. If we do get to see any of these characters appear onscreen in future MCU projects with different filmmakers, I can’t say for sure if I’ll experience this same level of trust again, because, as with the examples I just cited, the execution can go either way.

However, what I do know with utmost certainty is that if any of these witches happen to make their return in an MCU project from someone working on this show (or its predecessor), then I’ll be fully confident in how their characters will be treated.