The following is definitely my opinion. I always say that I encourage everyone to form their own opinion on a show and I usually tell people to do the opposite of what I say for so many different reasons. That’s going to apply here while talking about what I perceive to be as Marvel’s greatest weakness in their current entertainment juggernaut. That weakness is an inability to make their shows as compelling as their movies. You may disagree with me on this premise and that’s fine. This is seriously just how I see their current workings, so let’s kick it off.
When it comes to Marvel films, it seems to me that they find a hit more often than not. Even when Marvel puts out a “bad” film, it’s a fairly entertaining film and I would watch it before most any other film. They take a lot of time and effort to create these films and they’re often pretty well rooted in stories we know and love. Then there are the TV shows.
By contrast, the TV shows usually run with new ideas. There’s always exceptions to this and WandaVision is probably the biggest example of this. But more often than not, the stories are created in writer rooms and are developed with the show in mind. Maybe that’s the issue, I don’t know. Maybe the films being rooted in history and the shows being rooted in creativity lends to the striking disparity between the two offerings. I couldn’t say for sure, I can only speculate.
What I do know is that I find myself struggling to finish some of these Marvel shows while I sit with bated breath watching the films. Moon Knight is a solid example of this at play. I’ve written reviews for both episodes and they’ve not exactly been award-winning reviews. Here’s Episode 1 and here’s Episode 2 if you’re interested. My biggest issues thus far have been writing choices that have little to do with the overall importance of the show and are mostly procedural choices. When I say this, I mean that they’re episode-to-episode decisions that seem to be there to move along the plot at that time rather than give you any real overall backstory.
Let’s take the Moon Knight personality of Steven Grant. That personality has spent the better part of two episodes failing to grow in any way outside of giving himself a different appearance. He’s constantly been crying, screaming, and running around cluelessly for two whole episodes. If you’re writing a 23-episode show, this amounts to very little of your overall plot and it makes sense to carry things on for a couple episodes in order to establish a pattern. When you’re operating with six episodes, that’s a quarter of your entire plot dedicated to crying, babbling, and no forward direction. That’s asking a lot more of your audience.
If Moon Knight were a two and a half hour film and over half of it was dedicated to the same actions, people would find it problematic. This feels like the biggest problem for Disney right now. They’ve been caught between two different mindsets and neither of them seem to work. The first mindset is to create a movie out of the six or eight episodes and chop that up into digestible portions. The second mindset seems to be creating a different experience for the viewer every episode.
Disney has had some success with the latter, but not so much with the former. It’s been their success with creating something different each time that maybe led them to believe it’s a viable path for creating content in general when it was really best suited for the Star Wars Universe, which isn’t as rigidly defined as the Marvel Universe. Maybe that’s where this falls apart for Disney, I don’t know. But taking one of these two approaches seems to have created a little division within the fanbase. Some enjoy these shows, others find them to be full of unoriginal writing and poor tropes. While I fall into the second category, I totally understand why people are in the first category.
It’s important to remember that not every story has to be incredible. That’s probably part of my personal shortcomings when it comes to my personal experience. If I’m constantly expecting greatness and can’t be okay with general filler, that’s on me and not on Disney. If Disney isn’t trying to create masterpiece after masterpiece and instead going for solid television that allows room for growth and experimentation down the line, then the problem isn’t with their products. The problem is with my expectations and demands. I’m not sure which it is right now, but I do know that I’m far from the only person to feel this way.
At the end of the day, however, I come back to what I said at the top of this column. I don’t want or expect people to share my viewing experience. I want them to have their own and to judge shows based on those expectations. Furthermore, I truly believe that many of these shows are better than most anything you will find on television. So even if I think the show is “bad” within a certain context, I still think they’re great overall. I think this is what society calls a first-world problem.