Provided by Marvel/Disney

Welcome to Westview

WandaVision, the newest and riskiest addition to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, has taken the critical world by storm. After a couple of movies with relatively predictable climaxes, Disney gambled its new Marvel phase on the success of a television show that exclusively airs on Disney+, and I would say it paid off in spades. This is largely thanks to how different it is compared to the last Avengers films.

Love it or hate it, Infinity War is not a great stand-alone movie if you haven’t seen or read much Marvel before. I think it was meant to be a love letter to dedicated fans, so I felt left out in the cold, as someone who hadn’t seen most of the Marvel movies. That experience behind me, and knowing another 3-hour Avengers blockbuster called Endgame was in the works, I decided to watch every single Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) movie in a summer.

I’ve seen them all now, including Endgame, but I’m still not the person that gets overly excited for new Marvel releases. Some did catch my attention more than others. I’ve really enjoyed the recent Tom Holland Spiderman series, but the Iron Man and Captain America trilogies frankly underwhelmed me. Marvel seems to keep trying to outdo itself in terms of action and death, and there’s only so far you can take those stories before they become repetitive or run out of steam.

This brings us to Marvel’s latest MCU tie-in television series, WandaVision. After Avengers: Endgame, I wasn’t sure how to feel about WandaVision when it was announced because … none of the promos made any sense to me. Now, I know that was on purpose because it’s so different from anything Marvel has released before. It centers around this false reality, starring Wanda Maximoff and Vision in their own sitcom that seems to move through a different decade’s style of TV as it goes. Of course, not all is as it seems.

Sure, we’ve seen weird, virtual-reality arcs before, but never like this. I decided to watch WandaVision after Twitter exploded over the first episode, and oh boy, was I roped back into the MCU because of it. I’m not alone, either! Every corner of the internet seems to be obsessed with the show. 

Wandavision is a mysterious ride through television eras past
Photo provided by Marvel/Disney

So what is it about WandaVision that made it more palatable to a wider audience? I’m personally drawn to the show because it’s unpredictable and focused on the emotional journeys of the characters instead of long, and often way-too-drawn-out, action sequences. There’s more subtlety in the action. It feels like a puzzle that needs to be solved piece by piece.

Each episode seems to land on an even bigger cliffhanger than the last, making the WandaVision frenzy more powerful as it goes. Not to mention, the massive dose of nostalgia given to us each week as we travel through different time periods of television is great. I love shows like I Love Lucy and Bewitched, so the first two episodes were my favorites, but I’m just flat out hooked on the mystery of Westview now.

This feels like a smarter, well-thought-out, detailed and exciting start to this new age of Marvel. I can only hope that they continue putting this much into the new series of movies that are slated for the next few years because if they do, I may have to go pick up some comic books and become a full-blown fan.  

WandaVision is currently streaming on Disney+, with new episodes
every Friday.