WandaVision
Cast & Key People
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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 spinoff) 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?
