The first season of Agents Of S.H.I.E.L.D. is better than you remember
A decade after the MCU launched its first show, we reconsider the quality of its inaugural season
TV Features Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.
At some point during its seven-season run on ABC, the producers of Marvel’s Agents Of S.H.I.E.L.D. got so tired of seeing the phrase “After a rocky start…” in otherwise mostly positive reviews that they had T-shirts made up with the words printed on the front and wore them to press interviews. It’s proof of the old adage that if you repeat something often enough, people will believe it. Other than the tired argument over whether Agents Of S.H.I.E.L.D. is officially part of MCU canon or not (which we won’t relitigate here), the idea that the show stumbled out of the gate might be its most enduring legacy. But looking back on those early episodes as we approach the 10th anniversary of the series premiere (September 24, 2013), it’s time to rethink that conventional wisdom.
To be fair, Agents Of S.H.I.E.L.D. did not emerge in its first season perfectly formed like Athena from the head of Zeus. As the first MCU series, it was an ongoing experiment that needed some recalibrating. Coming off the high of The Avengers, the show was supposed to be a small-scale procedural about ordinary S.H.I.E.L.D. agents on the ground dealing with extraordinary threats. Meanwhile, Marvel and ABC were promoting the series with the tagline “It’s all connected.” The creative team behind the show knew that fans would be expecting MCU tie-ins and maybe an Avenger or two to drop by; they also knew they weren’t going to be able to give them that (this was the pre-Disney+ era when television still had the stigma, and the budget, of a lesser medium). At this point in the MCU timeline most of the world was still processing the sudden emergence of sky gods and an alien invasion of New York City, so Agents Of S.H.I.E.L.D. took that idea and expanded into a premise.
The series premiere kicks everything off with big action sequences (including an opening chase scene filmed on location in Paris) and plenty of Whedonesque humor. Which makes sense, since Joss Whedon himself directed it and co-wrote the pilot with his brother Jed Whedon and Jed’s partner Maurissa Tancharoen. It introduces the team under the leadership of Phil Coulson (Clark Gregg), somehow resurrected after being killed by Loki in The Avengers (how and why that happened is an ongoing mystery in season one). We meet special agent Grant Ward (Brett Dalton), British scientists Fitz (Iain De Caestecker) and Simmons (Elizabeth Henstridge), legendary kick-ass Melinda May (Ming-Na Wen), and rogue hacker Skye (Chloe Bennet), who embark on their first mission to save a desperate, wannabe hero (guest star J. August Richards) under the influence of an unstable serum that gives him superpowers. The episode was a thrilling and confident mission statement, though its scale may have set up unrealistic expectations for the future of the series.
Finding a formula that worked
Though he would keep his co-creator credit, Joss Whedon mostly stepped back from the series after that, while Jed Whedon and Tancharoen stayed on as executive producers and showrunners for all seven seasons, alongside Angel and Alias alum Jeffrey Bell. Throughout the first season you can feel the writers playing with different tones, rhythms, and structures in real time as they figured out what worked within the show’s format. Though it initially attempted to be a hybrid show in the mold of The X-Files (or Buffy The Vampire Slayer, if you prefer), the cases of the week were often thematically linked to B-plots furthering several ongoing serialized storylines, including Coulson’s miraculous return from the dead, Skye’s search for her parents, and the identity of the sinister mastermind known only as The Clairvoyant. Episodes like “The Girl In The Flower Dress,” “The Hub,” “Seeds,” and “T.R.A.C.K.S.” (which featured an MCU-requisite Stan Lee cameo) deftly balance standalone stories with world-building arcs in a way that would become increasingly rare in later seasons as the show became more serialized.
Other case episodes gave us insight into the characters we were still getting to know. “FZZT” demonstrated the strong bond between FitzSimmons and gave De Caestecker and Henstridge a chance to show off their acting chops. “The Well” was loosely tied into Thor: The Dark World and filled us in on Ward’s tragic backstory, which would pay off nicely in the runup to the finale. Not all of the show’s first 22 episodes were successful, but even the clunkers had some fun moments, like the witty banter in “The Asset,” or May’s prank on Fitz in “Repairs,” or every time Ruth Negga popped up as Raina. Though they were still tied to the continuity of the MCU at this point, the writers did their best to build out their corner of the sandbox, where they could independently play with their own characters and ideas without dealing with anything going on in the movies. Until they had to.
Absorbing shockwaves from the MCU
The fall of S.H.I.E.L.D. in Captain America: The Winter Soldier was a minor disruption in the MCU, but for Agents Of S.H.I.E.L.D. the revelation that their organization had been infiltrated by Hydra for decades was nothing short of catastrophic. It also led to some of the best episodes in the show’s entire run. Beginning with the appropriately titled “End Of The Beginning” it’s an intense, seven-episode sprint to the finale. Once the octopus is out of the bag, the paranoia really sets in. Is May up to something sinister? Is high-ranking S.H.I.E.L.D. agent Victoria Hand (Saffron Burrows) a Hydra spy? Is Coulson? Nope, the actual wolf in the herd turns out to be Grant Ward (under orders from his mentor John Garret, played with delicious gravitas by the late, great Bill Paxton).
Ward’s brilliant heel turn (does it still count if you’ve been secretly playing for the other team the whole time?) comes in episode 17, “Turn, Turn, Turn,” and builds the momentum as everything the show had set up in the season so far is torn away. It was a breakthrough for the show and the character of Ward, who went from a stiff action hero to cold, calculating villain with the pull of a trigger. The suspense of waiting for the team to find out the truth and wondering what he’ll do next drives the momentum across several episodes. Ward’s post-revelation transgressions include: killing Eric Koenic (Patton Oswalt), the affable custodian of the secret base where the agents take refuge, kidnapping Skye (for whom he seems to have genuine feelings, twisted as that is), and jettisoning Fitz and Simmons to the bottom of the ocean in a med pod. It was as personal as it was diabolical. After trying to set up a series of mostly ineffectual bad guys, the show finally had an adversary worth our attention.
A little nostalgia goes a long way
The writers went into the second season with a much clearer idea of what the show was, and despite budget cuts and cast changes Agents Of S.H.I.E.L.D. would go on to become the longest running Marvel TV series, with a total of 136 episodes produced (a record that’s not likely to be surpassed anytime soon). While the show did get objectively better with time, dipping back into any of those early episodes on the Bus (the nickname for the fancy plane where they lived and worked) is like reliving a fond memory from a simpler time. The characters were still relatively innocent and lighthearted, with no idea of the traumas in store for them. There are also more exterior locations and fewer of those gray hallways that would characterize the show in later seasons, too. (As executive producer Jeffrey Bell put it in an interview with The A.V. Club, “It’s cheaper to go to another planet than to go to Van Nuys.”) Was it a perfect first season? No. But maybe we should replace the word “rocky” with something a little more hopeful. “After a promising start…” has a nice ring to it.
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48 Comments
I loved this show from the jump, and Iâm glad to see it getting some recognition recently. Maybe itâs time for a rewatch
Thatâs what Iâve been thinking. Iâm almost done with my 12 Monkeys rewatch(great show if you havenât seen it btw) so it might be time to watch AoS again.
12 Monkeys is so, so much better than it had any right to be. It was amazing, AND stuck the landing. Just a super show.(and some great reunions on this last season of Picard)
Damn right! I donât think Iâve watched the whole thing since the final season so I felt it was a good time to give it a rewatch. I love how stuff that they set up from the beginning pays off so far down the line. It was put together amazingly well.
Agreed. I think I’ll give it a rewatch.
I do remember finding the Ward twist incredibly done. And oh boy do I remember those A.V. Club review threads.
On the plus side, Cindy â youâre not Barsanti! đ But I posted this in the other thread in re: waiting 17 episodes for Agents of SHIELD to get where it wanted to go with the HYDRA twist (âTurn Turn Turnâ) which was largely a failure of writing to keep it as engaging before the twist:Itâs one of those things that works in retrospect, sure. And I dug it. But this is a television show, on network television, which requires viewers â and it took 17 episodes into that first season to show that the show… wasnât what it was presenting itself as.Whilst it worked perfectly as a narrative device, as a television show it was somewhat lacking on network television and hemorrhaged viewers; even ignoring the bump for the pilot, they were down about 40% of viewers from episode 2 onwards by the time they hit episode 17. They were also down from a 3.3 share to a 1.9 share in the demo they needed to hit. Itâs frankly amazing this show went 7 seasons!
I rewatched the show last year, and hereâs the thing: the first season is a lot better when you know the Ward twist is coming.
The first time I watched it, he was just, as the article notes, stiff for 17 episodes. Stiff and uninteresting. If it had been âBuffyâ I would have trusted that the writers knew what they were doing. But there was no reason to believe they were doing anything clever or interesting.
The âspoilerâ made it better, which makes me wonder whether they should have let the viewers in on Wardâs double agentry sooner than they did. I know the reveal made it more powerful, but how many people had tuned up before it came?
I quit the show in part because of Wardâs super-boringness. The best part of the show was coming to the reviews here to see how many times the comment section would refer to him with variations on MST3Kâs âDavid Ryderâ bit.
Hive Spaceblast!
Buff Drinkslots!
Except the actor for Ward had no idea he was going to be a villain until he got the script for Turn, Turn, Turn. So this is all metatext. He FEELS like a better character when his narcissistic douchebag Bond archetype with no charisma that everyone wants to sleep with and who talks constant crap about everything is actually the bad guy instead of the rakish swashbuckling Han Solo character.But he wasnât meant to be the bad guy. They decided he made a better bad guy because he was a horribly written hero. Brett Dalton (who is actually a lovely human being in real life) was actually pretty upset that they made him the bad guy because he was expecting a heroic character arc instead (which the writers werenât skilled enough to give him).This is one of the issues with Agents of SHIELD. Itâs a show that is exactly as bad as everyone says it was but which gives a faint thrill of âoh, I understand that referenceâ to one group and a bit of frissonesque âaha, you did the thing with the thingâ to another. Combined this gives it the illusion of good writing, but if you listen to the dialogue, follow the character arcs, and piece together the cause and effect of the story developments it is a show that is â actually worse when you think about it.And the show lampshades how bad the writing is sometimes. Thereâs the off-hand comment by Mack in Season 4 that Daisy somehow forgot sheâs a world class computer hacker because they turned her into a superspy action heroine with superpowers. Thereâs the early season 2 observation that Daisy/Skyeâs hacker group was completely right that SHIELD was a bunch of extralegal fascists the whole time (which the show forgot she joined SHIELD to prove, and which she ultimately handwaves because her hacker group does a heel turn and becomes a bunch of terrorists justifying her staying with SHIELD), thereâs Coulson constantly solving all of his problems with fascism which gets addressed in Season 6 when someone tells him he might actually just be a bad SHIELD agent and someone else should do his job â and then someone else does and everyoneâs happy until that guy dies randomly and Coulson is just back doing his job despite people pointing out he really sucks at it. Thereâs even a long rant by Talbot pointing out that they keep screwing everything up and solving things with hairbrained last minute schemes that donât make any sense.The show is just fluffy and terrible on its surface but kind of insidious and gross and cynical underneath. Itâs held together by its core cast being delightful at times, but to get there they had to turn Grant Wardâs horribly written and unlikeable character into a villain… but to make sure Brett Dalton, the nice human being, kept getting a paycheck they kept having to make up reasons to keep him around and give him lines long past the point he stopped mattering.Agents of SHIELD is exactly as bad as people remember. And Season 4+ is exactly as good as people remember. Everyone knew the deal and knew this premise was stretched threadbare and had to be reinvented.
I agree that the first season (and Ward specifically) would have been a LOT more interesting if they had teased the Hydra reveal to the viewer from the start, but they had to keep the Winter Soldier movie reveal a secret. Disney wasnât about to sacrifice the big-budget Captain America movie so that the ABC-aired spinoff show would be a little more compelling. Maybe the show should have started a year later, but set in the same time, so that the audience would know Hydra was coming.
The whole first season, up until the Hydra reveal, just felt like it was treading water. They knew they had something to say and characters to evolve, but couldnât do it from the jump. So there were random MCU references thrown in and a bunch of half-baked characters thrown together until that could happen.
Remember the era of television where you didnât have to be a huge hit right out of the gate but were sometimes given multiple seasons to find your footing?I miss that.
Yeah… that wasnât even really a thing, depending. Itâs hard to imagine now, but Cheers was a bubble show its first season. It won the Emmy, and then took off to the stratosphere in its second season…But also, itâs very hard to compare eras since even with the Cheers example (74th out of 77th in that season)… it was still a 13.1 rating! Thatâs five to six times the rating of an âokayâ show like AoS, even if itâs roughly only 50 – 60% of the total viewers! (tl, dr: there were many, many fewer shows and fewer overall viewers than the modern era!)
I believe it was Brandon Tartikoff who showed faith in Cheers and then, eight years later, Seinfeld, when both had disastrous ratings launches.Then he moved to Paramount and his first thing there was to half-invent Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and formally commissioned it. Guy knew his stuff (sadly he passed away a few years later).
We would never have gotten Best of Both Worlds.
The only memory of the first season that jumps out for me is an episode where some bad guy blows a hole in the plane mid flight, and as he is about to be sucked out of the hole (while he is also fighting the agents) one of them saves him. And I remember thinking “that agent works for Nick Fury?”.
Pffftttt! Youâre nuts. The first season of AoS sucked total ass. I nearly gave up on the show due to the abysmal start and I have quite the tolerance for badly done comic book movies and TV shows.At least Ghost Rider and his â69 Charger appeared about a dozen eps of that one AoS seasonâthat plot move really turned my crank.
Iâd watch a full movie with the Robby Reyes GR and his Charger.
I binged S1 after seeing all the hype about the twist and thought it worked well when watched that way. Still the weakest season overall of the show and I can also imagine waiting a week between episodes where next to nothing is happening would be frustrating.
The twist was handled very thrillingly. Even the music to accompany it. The poster for that episode was pretty cool, too, for how lame network TV marketing can be.The portion of season 1 that preceded âTurn, Turn, Turnâ was…fun at best, necessary at worst. The series did not really start to hit the emotional arcs until Wardâs betrayal.
Not just Bill Paxton in season 1, but Kyle McLaughlin chewing up the screen in season 2.
No, it was dogshit. A bland ABC Marvel show through and through.
The second season of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. is like a completely different show from the first season, and some of the best TV Marvel ever made.
Skye shooting Ward in the back after he sets her free is STILL one of my favorite TV moments.
Season 2 of AoS is good for three episodes until they kill off the best characters by Episode 3 and itâs back to just being lukewarm tapioca pudding AoS again.
I remember the first half of season 2 regarding the mystery around the symbols and then the search for the Inhuman city was just really well done.
Counterpoint: No, it really, really isnât.Thank goodness it got better in the second season.
Thank you. The first few episodes, especially the first three, were pretty rough for sure. But AoS also suffered from viewers expecting a different show than what was produced. Iâd say âThe Bridgeâ is where things really start to improve, but there are decent to good episodes even before that. âThe Hubâ is an absolute banger. Itâs the first great Daisy/Simmons interaction, and the visual gag of Fitz trying to roll a cart through automatic sliding doors was top-notch.Aside from the diversion of âYes Menâ (although Iâm always happy to see Sif), the stretch from âT.R.A.C.K.S.â to âEnd of the Beginningâ is a really strong, taught lead-up to the game-changer of âTurn, Turn, Turn.â But after âRepairs,â I donât think thereâs a truly bad episode in season 1. âYes Menâ and âThe Only Light in the Darknessâ are skippable, but perfectly OK. Otherwise thereâs a strong narrative drive through the back half of the season, and Iâd actually put it above S3 at least in season rankings.
I still think TRACKS is where it really took the leap.
This show was consistently entertaining. Thatâs all I needed it to be.
Yep. It was appointment television in my household, back when that was still a thing.
really wish disney incorporated SHIELD and the characters into secret invasion.Â
It was okay in the first season, The Sif episode helped connect it to the larger universe. My biggest complaint wasnât the blandness of the first part before the twist. My complaint is you had Brad Douriff as a potential bad guy and they killed him in one episode.
â…this was the pre-Disney+ era when television still had the stigma, and the budget, of a lesser medium…âThis was 2013 when The Sopranos and Deadwood and Mad Men and Breaking Bad and Battlestar Galactica and The Wire and Six Feet Under and Homeland and Game of Thrones had all aired â to name just the ones that came to mind immediately.
Martin Sheen had already starred in a network drama and Glenn Close had come in on one on basic cable. The stigma of TV as a lesser medium was long gone.
Notice that all the shows you listed were on cable with shorter seasons. You might get a big draw on your big budget prestige shows, but thatâs different from the standard 22-episode network series. We all knew we werenât going to get a Chris Evans or RJD appearance on a network television show.
Before the TWS reveal, the writers faced an extremely difficult task: come up with threats significant enough to put the team in credible danger, but not significant enough to justify bringing in Cap and the rest of the SHIELD cavalry. (And make the threats far-out enough to justify SHIELDâs involvement, but not so dramatic as to necessitate calling up Tony or Banner.)Some eps were better than others, and the early ones had some impressive location shooting, but, given the creative constraints, itâs understandable the pre-TWS eps/arcs didnât exactly wow the MCU-going world.
Itâs time for a rewatch for me. I really enjoyed the first season. I twisted my mind a bit to come up with ways that Ward would turn out NOT to be a bad guy, then went with it, and Iâm glad the show did too.I finally did finish the show, but had quite a few stretches where I wasnât watching. Should be fun to watch the whole thing again, but jeez. 7 seasons. Okay, Iâll do it.
If it is better than I remember then it must be freaking incredible nowadays.
I tried, but just couldnât get through the first season. It was just so fucking dull and even knowing the twist and hearing that it got better isnât enough to get me to bother trying to revisit it.
Just start with the twist episode then. You already know youâre not missing anything before it.
Nah. Iâm glad people liked it but I just have no interest in going back to it now.
The weakest was actually Season 2 with the Jiaying/Afterlife arc. And that just may have been due to cheesy production design. It was also disappointing when Bobbi left the show. She added energy to every scene she was in.
The worst thing I can say about season one of AoS is that it wants to be in the X-Files/Fringe mode and simply comes off as earnestly wanting to be part of that club. Fun mention: though future seasons did the slow-build and call-back thing more smoothly, in season one, they do a fun C-Plot call back near the end where … as the season progresses, all the âsupernatural MCU adjacentâ items that are confiscated throughout the first dozen episodes, get put in the same storage locker. The payoff is late in the season as things get crazy – at one point team Coulson and team Ward break into the storage locker and start having shootouts with all the toys collected up to that point. Itâs something that only really pays off after a re-watch. But it puts a plus in the plus column for season one: Yes, the show kicks into high gear after the Hydra reveal, but it also brings back the first 16 episodes worth of high-tech and wacky alien nuttery in a couple wild food-fight type sequences.
If you have to wait until episode 17 to get to the part the season becomes good, then the season wasn’t that good.
Looking back, it has all the hallmarks of a cult classic. So many expectations going in, too many cooks, an unfocused first season, and a diminishment in ratings and audience engagement that results in budget cuts for future seasons. And through all that…ultimately thriving creatively, perhaps not just in spite of all those things, but because of them.The Ward twist was a great decision creatively speaking for so many reasons. Though unfortunately, I remember finding it pretty easy to guess by process of elimination and once we knew that one of the original six-member team was going to be a traitor.
lol i remember that i liked the show and the only reason why i stopped watching is because they changed Skyeâs name to Daisy… i just thought it was a lame name