At some point during its seven-season run on ABC, the producers of Marvel’s Agents Of S.H.I.E.L.D. got so tired of seeing the phrase “After a rocky start...” in otherwise mostly positive reviews that they had T-shirts made up with the words printed on the front and wore them to press interviews. It’s proof of the old adage that if you repeat something often enough, people will believe it. Other than the tired argument over whether Agents Of S.H.I.E.L.D. is officially part of MCU canon or not (which we won’t relitigate here), the idea that the show stumbled out of the gate might be its most enduring legacy. But looking back on those early episodes as we approach the 10th anniversary of the series premiere (September 24, 2013), it’s time to rethink that conventional wisdom.
To be fair, Agents Of S.H.I.E.L.D. did not emerge in its first season perfectly formed like Athena from the head of Zeus. As the first MCU series, it was an ongoing experiment that needed some recalibrating. Coming off the high of The Avengers, the show was supposed to be a small-scale procedural about ordinary S.H.I.E.L.D. agents on the ground dealing with extraordinary threats. Meanwhile, Marvel and ABC were promoting the series with the tagline “It’s all connected.” The creative team behind the show knew that fans would be expecting MCU tie-ins and maybe an Avenger or two to drop by; they also knew they weren’t going to be able to give them that (this was the pre-Disney+ era when television still had the stigma, and the budget, of a lesser medium). At this point in the MCU timeline most of the world was still processing the sudden emergence of sky gods and an alien invasion of New York City, so Agents Of S.H.I.E.L.D. took that idea and expanded into a premise.
The series premiere kicks everything off with big action sequences (including an opening chase scene filmed on location in Paris) and plenty of Whedonesque humor. Which makes sense, since Joss Whedon himself directed it and co-wrote the pilot with his brother Jed Whedon and Jed’s partner Maurissa Tancharoen. It introduces the team under the leadership of Phil Coulson (Clark Gregg), somehow resurrected after being killed by Loki in The Avengers (how and why that happened is an ongoing mystery in season one). We meet special agent Grant Ward (Brett Dalton), British scientists Fitz (Iain De Caestecker) and Simmons (Elizabeth Henstridge), legendary kick-ass Melinda May (Ming-Na Wen), and rogue hacker Skye (Chloe Bennet), who embark on their first mission to save a desperate, wannabe hero (guest star J. August Richards) under the influence of an unstable serum that gives him superpowers. The episode was a thrilling and confident mission statement, though its scale may have set up unrealistic expectations for the future of the series.
Finding a formula that worked
Though he would keep his co-creator credit, Joss Whedon mostly stepped back from the series after that, while Jed Whedon and Tancharoen stayed on as executive producers and showrunners for all seven seasons, alongside Angel and Alias alum Jeffrey Bell. Throughout the first season you can feel the writers playing with different tones, rhythms, and structures in real time as they figured out what worked within the show’s format. Though it initially attempted to be a hybrid show in the mold of The X-Files (or Buffy The Vampire Slayer, if you prefer), the cases of the week were often thematically linked to B-plots furthering several ongoing serialized storylines, including Coulson’s miraculous return from the dead, Skye’s search for her parents, and the identity of the sinister mastermind known only as The Clairvoyant. Episodes like “The Girl In The Flower Dress,” “The Hub,” “Seeds,” and “T.R.A.C.K.S.” (which featured an MCU-requisite Stan Lee cameo) deftly balance standalone stories with world-building arcs in a way that would become increasingly rare in later seasons as the show became more serialized.
Other case episodes gave us insight into the characters we were still getting to know. “FZZT” demonstrated the strong bond between FitzSimmons and gave De Caestecker and Henstridge a chance to show off their acting chops. “The Well” was loosely tied into Thor: The Dark World and filled us in on Ward’s tragic backstory, which would pay off nicely in the runup to the finale. Not all of the show’s first 22 episodes were successful, but even the clunkers had some fun moments, like the witty banter in “The Asset,” or May’s prank on Fitz in “Repairs,” or every time Ruth Negga popped up as Raina. Though they were still tied to the continuity of the MCU at this point, the writers did their best to build out their corner of the sandbox, where they could independently play with their own characters and ideas without dealing with anything going on in the movies. Until they had to.
Absorbing shockwaves from the MCU
The fall of S.H.I.E.L.D. in Captain America: The Winter Soldier was a minor disruption in the MCU, but for Agents Of S.H.I.E.L.D. the revelation that their organization had been infiltrated by Hydra for decades was nothing short of catastrophic. It also led to some of the best episodes in the show’s entire run. Beginning with the appropriately titled “End Of The Beginning” it’s an intense, seven-episode sprint to the finale. Once the octopus is out of the bag, the paranoia really sets in. Is May up to something sinister? Is high-ranking S.H.I.E.L.D. agent Victoria Hand (Saffron Burrows) a Hydra spy? Is Coulson? Nope, the actual wolf in the herd turns out to be Grant Ward (under orders from his mentor John Garret, played with delicious gravitas by the late, great Bill Paxton).
Ward’s brilliant heel turn (does it still count if you’ve been secretly playing for the other team the whole time?) comes in episode 17, “Turn, Turn, Turn,” and builds the momentum as everything the show had set up in the season so far is torn away. It was a breakthrough for the show and the character of Ward, who went from a stiff action hero to cold, calculating villain with the pull of a trigger. The suspense of waiting for the team to find out the truth and wondering what he’ll do next drives the momentum across several episodes. Ward’s post-revelation transgressions include: killing Eric Koenic (Patton Oswalt), the affable custodian of the secret base where the agents take refuge, kidnapping Skye (for whom he seems to have genuine feelings, twisted as that is), and jettisoning Fitz and Simmons to the bottom of the ocean in a med pod. It was as personal as it was diabolical. After trying to set up a series of mostly ineffectual bad guys, the show finally had an adversary worth our attention.
A little nostalgia goes a long way
The writers went into the second season with a much clearer idea of what the show was, and despite budget cuts and cast changes Agents Of S.H.I.E.L.D. would go on to become the longest running Marvel TV series, with a total of 136 episodes produced (a record that’s not likely to be surpassed anytime soon). While the show did get objectively better with time, dipping back into any of those early episodes on the Bus (the nickname for the fancy plane where they lived and worked) is like reliving a fond memory from a simpler time. The characters were still relatively innocent and lighthearted, with no idea of the traumas in store for them. There are also more exterior locations and fewer of those gray hallways that would characterize the show in later seasons, too. (As executive producer Jeffrey Bell put it in an interview with The A.V. Club, “It’s cheaper to go to another planet than to go to Van Nuys.”) Was it a perfect first season? No. But maybe we should replace the word “rocky” with something a little more hopeful. “After a promising start...” has a nice ring to it.
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