WandaVision

Our Review

The MCU’s boldest TV experiment: Wanda Maximoff and Vision living out sitcom decades — ’50s black-and-white through the modern era — in a town called Westview, with laugh tracks hiding something deeply wrong. The premise (sitcom pastiche as grief metaphor: Wanda, who lost Vision, has rewritten reality into the fantasy where they’re happy) was a cultural moment — the weekly mystery-box release made Fridays appointment TV for a streamer that usually drops everything at once.

The sitcom pastiches are lovingly exact: era-accurate aspect ratios, jokes, and commercials (each ad a clue), and the slow reveal pays off in a finale that trades universe-scale stakes for a woman’s grief — the smallest, biggest ending the MCU has done. Kathryn Hahn’s Agatha Harkness (“Agatha All Along” was the year’s best needle-drop, and the character spawned her own spin-off) and Paul Bettany’s Vision give it real soul. The show’s later MCU importance came after; this season stands alone as a beautiful, sad experiment.

Verdict: Watch it. What is grief, if not love persevering?