WandaVision’s inventive approach to blending different storytelling genres made it one of the most compelling pieces of television Marvel has ever produced. The show became appointment viewing week after week as it fleshed out its central mystery in a way that was fun to follow along with. And for a while, it felt like WandaVision’s story was part of an ambitious plan to push Marvel’s films in an interesting new direction.
Marvel seemingly lost the thread of that plan somewhere between WandaVision and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness — a follow-up film that glossed over the show’s juicy emotional beats in favor of dizzying spectacle and more explicitly horror vibes. But Agatha All Along, Disney Plus’ newest MCU series from showrunner Jac Schaeffer, feels like a sign that the studio has learned a few valuable lessons from its messy multiversal experiment.
Set a few years after the events of WandaVision and Multiverse of Madness, Agatha All Along picks up the story of its titular sorceress (Kathryn Hahn) at a time when everything about her world appears to be coming undone yet again — albeit under slightly different circumstances. Though almost everyone remembers what went down the last time witches showed up in Westview, New Jersey, the town’s actually a pretty peaceful place where people have learned to move on with their lives.
While folks like Sharon Davis (Debra Jo Rupp) have gotten used to scurrying past the vacant lot where the Maximoff / Vision family used to live, their collective trauma keeps them from saying her name out of fear that she might come back. But it also makes it easy for them to accept Agnes / Agatha Harkness (Hahn) as an ordinary, if eccentric, woman who’s trying to handle something they’ve all gone through. To them, Agatha’s mood swings and insistence on being called “Agnes” are just quirky coping mechanisms. But in truth, those are some of the first signs of Agatha becoming aware of the magical prison she became trapped in when last we saw her.
Agatha All Along seems like it’s angling for a slow burn at first as it drops you into a WandaVision-esque send-up of crime dramas (rather than sitcoms) like Mare of Easttown and True Detective. But the show quickly switches gears in a way that reads like Marvel understanding the show’s need to move past its predecessors’ inspired gimmick. It isn’t long before Agatha snaps back to her senses with the help of former lover Rio Vidal (Aubrey Plaza) and a magically adept teen she calls Teen (Joe Locke). With all of Agatha’s powers now gone, however, she has to form a coven and journey on the Witches’ Road in order to restore herself to her former glory.
Whereas WandaVision only really became properly witchy in its last few episodes, Agatha All Along dives right into the magic as it focuses on painting a more detailed picture of who Harkness is and how witchcraft (which is distinct from Doctor Strange’s whole deal) works. WandaVision alluded to Agatha’s treacherous past, but the new show explores how her centuries-long path to acquiring power made her a reviled villain in the witch community long before she ever set foot in Westview.
Sitcom Agnes / Agatha was a highlight in WandaVision, where her unhinged energy helped sell the show’s conceit and leave viewers guessing as to who was really pulling everyone’s strings. But Agatha All Along gives Hahn even more room to flex and vamp as Agatha’s hunt for a coven leads her to other witches like wellness guru Jennifer Kale (Sasheer Zamata), fortune teller Lilia Calderu (Patti LuPone), and security guard Alice Wu-Gulliver (Ali Ahn) — all of whom see her as a threat. They know Agatha’s killed members of her own coven before and that there’s something off about the way that Teen is unable to tell them anything about where he comes from. But the Witches’ Road can give each of them something they desperately want if they join Agatha on her quest.
Though it’s interesting to see more of Marvel’s more “grounded” magical world fleshed out through Agatha All Along’s new characters, the show has a pronounced “I’m putting together a rag-tag team” vibe that makes its beats feel formulaic in moments. Teen — a gothy Agatha fanboy Locke plays with charm and with a noticeably difficult-to-place accent — is meant to be one of the show’s compelling mysteries. But he’s also an audience surrogate whose inquisitive exchanges with the other witches sometimes come across like the show taking a moment to overexplain plot points that don’t really need spelling out.
Every bit of worldbuilding lore the show establishes — within a three-mile radius, there are always enough “witchy enough” people to form a coven, for instance — is followed up with a reiteration of why everyone’s following Agatha. Occasionally, it makes the show feel uncertain of whether it’s introducing too much lore. But when Agatha All Along leans into its weirdness and trusts you to piece things together, the series becomes much more of a spooky joyride that feels reflective of Schaeffer once again trying to bring a genuinely unique energy to the MCU.
You can feel and see this clearly once the gang is actually on the Witches’ Road — an otherworldly realm where they face a series of trials meant to test their knowledge of magic. Similar to the way WandaVision embodied the styles of various sitcoms, Agatha All Along feels like an ode (music features largely) to horror classics like Rosemary’s Baby and newer fare like American Horror Story: Coven.
Though some of the trials skew a bit cheesy — at one point, the witches fight a generational curse — they each highlight just how much of Agatha All Along’s magic is practically produced to compliment the show’s intricate sets. It makes the show stand out compared to Marvel’s usual CGI-laden projects and feel like a solid example of the studio prioritizing art over whizbang spectacle.
Agatha All Along is still a late-stage Marvel show, meaning that there are moments where your appreciation of what it’s doing will hinge on how familiar you are with the larger cinematic universe’s most recent events. But for viewers who’ve been following along and holding out hope for the studio to get back into putting out genuinely weird and playful riffs on the comics rather than hyping up the next big event, Agatha All Along should be a delight to watch — especially once it starts revealing its big secrets later this fall.
Agatha All Along also stars Paul Adelstein, Miles Gutierrez-Riley, Okwui Okpokwasili, Emma Caulfield, David Payton, Kate Forbes, and Asif Ali. The series’ first two episodes hit Disney Plus on September 18th.
Originally published as Agatha All Along review: a wild joyride through Marvel’s world of magic by Charles Pulliam-Moore on .
