Given its popularity, I thought this week I'd take a look at a bunch of different episodes and consider some of the techniques they use to tell the story--some that land well, and maybe also a couple that don't.
The pilot, by showrunner Jac Shaeffer, is enormously interesting. Like all pilots, it needs to set up the show, to establish the characters, the world, the conflict. It needs to tell us what we're going to be watching from week to week, and also why we should.
But here the conflict of the show is that the world and the characters are not who they seem to be. And more than that, none of them know it. It's a Mystery Box Show, in other words. Or if you will, a JJ.
The upside of JJs is that they generate a lot of heat. People love cracking a puzzle.
The downside is that they're often not terribly emotionally satisfying. In part it's because the end reveal almost never lives up to the attention that it draws. It almost can't.
But the bigger issue is that a puzzle is not a story. Rather than inviting emotional investment in characters, it actually requires a certain detachment. We want to step back, in fact, so we can figure out what's going on.
WANDAVISION goes the additional step of setting the pilot in a 1950s sitcom--a move that both highlights the "off-ness" of what we're seeing and also would seem to make everything that much more meta and emotionally removed.
But instead of treating the genre ironically, Schaeffer invests in its conceits. We get the big dinner with the boss who could make or break your career; secret embarrassments and drama going on around the cooking--all the craziest stuff in 1950s shows happen in the kitchen...
Tell Me You Wouldn't Have Watched A Fricky Spinoff
We also get each character having to improvise to protect the other in the most ridiculous way possible--I will now and forever call Paul Bettany "Diane"; and the nosey neighbor who instinctively focuses on the exact thing the characters would least like to discuss.
And each of those genre beats is used to lay out who Wanda and Vision are and the wonderful, hilarious partnership that they share.
Also
the nature of the world they're living in: 50s sitcom couples are like Adam and Eve in the garden, walking around wondering
Can You Believe This?, while helping each other get free of all the vines and snakes. It's about a fun and loving partnership in a crazy world. And that's exactly where Wanda and Vision are at
the start of this series.
The pilot is filled with quiet allusions to the sense of something being askew: it begins with the fact that there's something neither Wanda nor Vision can remember; Vision works at a company doing a mindless task that no one seems to understand the purpose of. When they talk on the phone Wanda insists she has everything under control, while Vision fears if the dinner doesn't go just right, it could be the end of everything. And there's the suddenly horrifying low point with the boss choking and his wife unable to stop saying "Stop it".
But until that very last beat set in the world watching "the show", the episode keeps pulling our attention back from mystery to the relationship. We end the "sitcom" not on the question of what is going on here, but with the two characters cementing their partnership in marriage, complete with rings, vows, a kiss and a final shot framed like a wedding album photo.
