Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.: Here's Proof That ABC and Marvel Don't Care About the Show
By
Kaitlin Thomas
Captain America: Civil War drawing in so much money it's easy to imagine that the higher ups at Marvel spend most of their days
splayed out on piles of cash like Huell from Breaking Bad. On the TV side, The CW has found relative success in cultivating an audience for its DC Comics superhero-themed dramas
Arrow and
The Flash,and Netflix has gained subscribers with
Jessica Jones and
Daredevil. But while superheroes and comic-based properties are flourishing elsewhere, ABC has struggled with its Marvel properties.
Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. is not a terribly deep show, nor is it a great show, but it has had its moments over the course of three low-rated seasons on ABC (the
just completed Season 3 averaged 3.4 million viewers and a 1.2 rating among adults ages 18-to-49). For most of its run, those moments have been the result of surprising betrayals, emotional longing, and trips to other planets, all of which pivoted around characters while also frequently pushing the plot forward. But on a weekly basis, especially in the case of the most recent half-season, the show has suffered narratively, either from ill-defined villains and low stakes, or by prioritizing story over character one too many times. But perhaps the show's biggest crime isn't that it's a fundamentally bad show—because it's not!—but rather that it's become a boring show with little connection to the larger Marvel Cinematic Universe. And ABC knows this and has apparently given up entirely on making it work.
On Tuesday, when
ABC released its fall 2016 schedule, it was revealed that the network had bumped the series from the 9pm hour, where it aired during Seasons 2 and 3, back to 10pm,
a timeslot that has notoriously killed every single show the network has scheduled there since Body of Proof and Private Practice ended in early 2013. Of the six scripted series that have aired in the timeslot since, only
Forever—which averaged 4.93 million viewers and a 1.12 rating—lasted a full season, and it was canceled despite being a charming and well-liked, if fairly vanilla, series because it was low-rated and produced by a non-Disney studio. Moving
Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. back an hour in its fourth season could be seen as the network taking a chance that a show with a proven track record—even if that track record is only a few but loyal viewers—will fare better than a brand new endeavor.
Or it could be the network killing the show quietly.
It's probable that the fans who've stuck with the struggling show this long will follow it anywhere, even the dumpster fire that is Tuesdays at 10pm. But next season, Coulson and the rest of the gang will be
up against NCIS: New Orleans (which averaged 12.97 million viewers, 1.75 rating this most recent season) on CBS and
Chicago Fire (8.0 million, 1.75, also its most recent season average) on NBC (Fox and The CW both air local news in the 10pm hour). However, this programming decision could also be seen as the network finally having given up on the struggling series and putting it out to pasture by scheduling it in a ratings black hole so that when the show is finally canceled next year, the network has a really solid case. The fact that the show—a spy series that exists within a comic book setting and features people with powers—is following a new two-hour family comedy block that does not really mesh tonally with
S.H.I.E.L.D., doesn't exactly instill confidence.
When it premiered in the fall of 2013,
Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. was Marvel's attempt to
take over the world expand its influence in another medium, having already made significant movements toward conquering the global box office with films like
The Avengers, which was the highest grossing film of 2012. The show's premiere more or less coincided with the beginning of Phase Two of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which included films like
Iron Man 3,
Captain America: The Winter Soldier, and
Guardians of the Galaxy (let's just pretend
Thor: The Dark World didn't happen). And while Phase Two really saw Marvel's dominance at the box office, the television side of things never really took off in the same way.
After a well-received debut guided by
Joss Whedon, the creator of beloved series like
Buffy the Vampire Slayer and
Firefly,
Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. struggled to engage viewers after the reins were passed to showrunners
Jed Whedon,
Maurissa Tancharoen, and
Jeffrey Bell. In that first season, because it existed within the same universe as Marvel's films, the show was forced to tread water until
Captain America: The Winter Soldier blew up the show's titular agency and revealed the presence of Hydra two-thirds of the way through the season. This development finally allowed the series to break out and resulted in one of its finest hours to date, the episode "Turn, Turn, Turn," which revealed a major betrayal from Agent Grant Ward (
Brett Dalton), a previously stock TV character with little definition who went on to become the series' most interesting character for the rest of that first season. Unfortunately for ABC and Marvel, by that point, a sizable chunk of the show's audience had given up on the series, and they never returned.
But ABC kept trying to make Marvel programming work. In 2014, under former President of ABC Entertainment Paul Lee, the network also greenlit a second live-action Marvel series with ties to the MCU.
Marvel's Agent Carter, a post-WWII drama developed following the positive reception of an Agent Carter-focused one-shot, saw
Hayley Atwellreprise her character from
Captain America: The First Avenger and followed her adventures as the lone female agent of the Strategic Scientific Reserve, the precursor to S.H.I.E.L.D. Despite increasingly positive reviews over the show's first season in 2015, it averaged just 5.02 million viewers and a 1.57 rating. It earned a surprise renewal despite its low ratings and returned for an acclaimed second season in 2016, again as a "gap show" between S.H.I.E.L.D.'s fall and spring half-seasons, and it performed even poorer than it had the first time around.
Earlier this month, ABC also passed on—for the second time—a potential
Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. spin-off centered around two of the show's most beloved characters, Bobbi Morse (a.k.a. Mockingbird) and Lance Hunter, both preexisting comic book characters.
Despite the potential that exists for corporate synergy—The Walt Disney Company, which owns ABC, acquired Marvel Entertainment and all of its subsidiaries in 2009—it no longer looks as if ABC, under current president Channing Dungey (Lee was forced out in February), cares about making Marvel TV shows work, especially since the two shows they've produced have largely proven to be unsuccessful in bringing a bit of Marvel's box office success to the small screen. Part of that stems from the fact that, despite Marvel's continued insistence that "it's all connected,"
Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. has no effect on the events of Marvel's films, something that has been hand-waved away with the excuse that the Avengers don't know Phil Coulson (
Clark Gregg) is alive, his character having been killed by Loki in
The Avengers but brought back to life for the series. And although
The Winter Soldier had a major influence on the trajectory of the show's narrative at the end of that first season, subsequent films have had little effect beyond name dropping characters and referencing major events. To make matters worse, the films also ignored a key piece of the show's third season, which was the sudden awakening of Inhumans all over Earth thanks to some tainted fish. The Avengers obviously deal in much larger problems, but one would think the sudden appearance of a great number of powered individuals, many of whom struggle with the inability to control said powers at first, would at least warrant a casual, if ultimately irrelevant, mention.
Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. star
Chloe Bennet, who plays lead character Daisy Johnson,
recently called attention to this problem at a fan convention. "The Marvel Cinematic Universe loves to pretend that everything is connected, but then they don’t acknowledge our show at all," she said, when asked if she would like to appear in one of the MCU's films. "People who make movies for Marvel, why don’t you acknowledge what happens on our show? Why don’t you guys go ask them that? 'Cause they don’t seem to care!"
Kevin Feige, president of Marvel Studios,
told io9 in April that crossing over was really a matter of working out timing before further acknowledging that the films are planned so far in advance that it's not possible to tie-in the events of the series. Which is a nice way of saying that it's never going to happen.
And so without ABC support and without interest from Marvel, what will become of
Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. in Season 4? The show's ratings are already pretty low, and the quality of the story suffered once the show returned from his midseason hiatus. We know that
S.H.I.E.L.D. can produce intense, adrenaline-pumping drama when it wants to put in the work, and so, if this next season is the end of the road, the writers should definitely put in the effort to craft stories revolving around the characters we already know and whose futures we are invested in, rather than spending all their time on poorly-constructed villains who ultimately don't matter. The final moments of the Season 3 finale hinted that a major change was coming for the series, so here's hoping it's enough.
http://www.tv.com/shows/marvels-age...of-shield-season-4-final-season-146358913298/
