Emmy nominee Laura Donney on WandaVision’s viral “What is grief?” dialogue
WandaVision's Laura Donney takes us behind writing her Emmy-nominated episode eight, "Previously On."
TV Features Laura Donney
The Marvel Cinematic Universe’s first Disney+ series, WandaVision, became instant fodder for weekly theories and Twitter discussions. The show about Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen) examined her long-simmering grief through the lens of various sitcom tropes. In doing so, WandaVision garnered 23 Emmy nominations, including one for Outstanding Limited or Anthology Series, as well as acting nominations for Olsen, Paul Bettany as Vision, and Kathryn Hahn as the villainous Agatha Harkness. The show also scored three of the six spots in the Outstanding Writing in a Limited or Anthology Series or TV Movie category, including a nomination for the moving episode, “Previously On.”
Laura Donney bagged her first Emmy nomination for writing “Previously On,” which travels through pivotal moments in Wanda’s life that shaped her. Donney tells The A.V. Club that it’s special to get validation, not only because of the hard work that went into it, but because of what the episode signifies in a larger sense: “There’s a certain risk in dedicating an entire episode to the emotional life of an MCU character. To spend time just talking and feeling, while dealing with the mythology and action of it all, it was exciting for me but it was a bold move.” She quickly learned everything there was to know about Wanda from the comics and the movies, but Donney says she thought of Marvel in one way until that point. “But here I am, part of this totally bonkers project that doesn’t align with my notion of the MCU. There’s a freedom in bringing this story to both old and new fans.”
While the audience and Agatha get to pore over Wanda’s transformative experiences through flashbacks in “Previously On,” the episode became the talk of the internet for a different reason all together. In a memory post-Age Of Ultron, Wanda has recently arrived at the Avengers compound, still reeling from the death of her twin brother Pietro. Vision tries to befriend her, hoping to alleviate her sorrow and calmly asks her, “What is grief, if not love persevering?” This singular moment kicked off a rabid discourse after screenwriter Madison Hatfield’s tweet about it went viral.
“When that blew up, it was astounding,” Donney shares. In talking about how the dialogue came to exist in the first place, she reveals that the line was written slightly different in the script. “I do remember what it is but I don’t think I’m allowed to share it,” she adds. As she recalls, her goal with this particular flashback scene with Vision was to expand on what Pietro’s death means for Wanda, because it went unexplored in the movies. “We wanted to pay attention to the loss of her sibling, but also show that this is a beginning of a love story. There’s sorrow and joy, that’s the reality of life,” Donney says.
According to Donney, the line changed while Olsen and Bettany were filming the scene:
“The way Jac Schaeffer tells it, they were all inspired to distill it down to the truth of what was being felt in the moment. So, it became a combination of the line on the page and what they magically cobbled together on set. To get all that attention alone, as an anxious person, it was overwhelming. It was also because I was getting all the credit when I felt it should be shared. At one point, I was like ‘Doesn’t everyone understand how writers rooms work?’. But what matters is the sentiment, and clearly that line struck a chord.”
The WandaVision writers still have an active group chat, and they celebrate the episode’s victory by sending memes about the dialogue. “There’s a lot of great ones out there, ‘what is blank if not blank persevering,’ which we share with each other,” Donney notes.
The room worked together for the first few weeks to form the nine-episode trajectory. Donney adds that head writer Schaeffer—who was “great at delegating according to our strengths”—then gave writers their individual episodes. Donney was assigned to the crucial eighth one, which provides answers and takes viewers through Wanda’s life before her arrival in the MCU. They narrowed down the key moments to add color to the story, starting with the death of her parents when she was a child in Sokovia. “For me, I called that flashback her ‘source trauma.’ It’s the beginning of how she is going to view her experiences with everything in life. I wanted it to be her origin story,” Donney says. “But the asterisks to show her moments of loss was those aren’t always about death. At Hydra, she loses who she is, but gains who she is meant to be.”
“Previously On” does reveal who Wanda Maximoff is meant to be from this point onwards in the movies. Donney previously said that Agatha’s line at the end, “This is chaos magic, Wanda, and that makes you The Scarlet Witch,” was one of her favorites to write. But the response to Vision’s line has definitely got her thinking: “For it to land as well as it did, I hope it’s good messaging for the industry at large that you don’t need to shy away from the heart and soul of a superhero like Wanda. People want to see that because that’s how they can see themselves in these characters.”
45 Comments
I still can’t believe that idiots on the internet thought it was a good idea to try and make people feel bad about getting in their feelings about a line of dialogue about grief. Like, I dunno if you didn’t notice, but there is, shall we say an unusually high number of people on the planet who are grieving right now. Maybe keep your clever snark in the drafts for once.
Also, as someone who’s lost a lot of people, that line genuinely hit me. I imagine those snarking about it either haven’t lost people close to them or are more emotionally removed from their losses than they should be.
Agreed. Allow me to refer you to yesterday’s Giz article –
https://gizmodo.com/online-trolls-actually-just-assholes-all-the-time-stud-1847575210
That episode aired a month after my mom died. So yeah, it hit me right where it was supposed to. Seeing people make fun of something so genuine just because it was part of a corporate mega-franchise really sucked.
My mom died when I was a teenager, and it got me right in the gut, too.
I’m sorry about your Mom.
This line hit me in a very specific way along with a really
heartbreaking piece of dialogue from Falcon & Winter Soldier: when
Bucky goes on his “date” with the girl from the restaurant, she talks
about how there’s a word for a child whose lost their parents (an
orphan) and for a person whose lost their spouse (a widow), but no word
for a parent whose lost their child. This is something that I, unfortunately, related to very deeply.
People
can make all the noise they want about how these Marvel shows aren’t
well-written or whatever, but sometimes the dialogue just shines, and you just cry.
she talks about how there’s a word for a child whose lost their parents (an orphan) and for a person whose lost their spouse (a widow), but no word for a parent whose lost their child.While I am certainly not mocking your reaction to that line, and I am EXTREMELY sorry for your loss, that line irked the shit out of me because it was ripped off almost word-for-word from an episode of Six Feet Under (and when I heard it on that show it hit me like a freight train).
Daaaaaaamn.
My best friend lost her 21 year old son in August of 2019. She has made this exact observation several times. What I really like about these shows is that, when they deal with grief, they aren’t using cliches that are hurtful, like “whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” and “you are never given more than you can handle” and so forth. My friend was given more than she could handle and she is barely keeping it together and really only because of her husband and she has another son. Otherwise, I suspect she would no longer be with us. And when she reads or hears these stupid platitudes that always seem to be saying, “Pull yourself together and get over it” it just makes her hurt even more.I hope you are doing OK, but I also hope that, if you are not, you have people in your life who give you permission to be not OK and don’t try to perk you up with drivel. And, in case you need to hear it, it’s OK to be not OK. Grief doesn’t have a timeline or a blueprint. I’d hug you if I could.
The sneering came about because of someone who tweeted about how brilliant they thought the line was, which gave the people who love to remind us how superior they are to popular entertainment an incentive to dogpile. The same happened with someone praising that Dany wings scene in Game of Thrones. I’m glad to hear the writers just enjoyed the memes and were able to tune out all the usual superiority contests.
The lesson, as always, is to never unironically enjoy anything unless the Twitter mob has decreed it acceptable (Brendan Fraser’s entire filmography is apparently safe now).
I would say the lesson is to do your best to ignore the Twitter mob.
It’s not just that they tweeted that the line is brilliant, but that they also posited, as at least one person in this very thread has, that if you can’t appreciate a cheesy line from a direct-to-streaming Disney TV series, you’re emotionally broken.
what about the “they’ll never know what you sacrificed for them” line. can we make fun of that?
I think it was more because the line was overpraised as one of the greatest things ever written and not like people making fun of grief.
I’m so fucking tired of those people. We can’t just enjoy a superhero thing or get real emotional catharsis from it during a time of death and grief and fear. We’re not supposed to like Hamilton anymore for some reason. Ted Lasso is bad, actually. If I ever created something that was generally enjoyed, I’d remove myself from all social media immediately, because as soon as people like a good thing, here come the assholes.
The internet’s so backwards. WandaVision has a million examples of not-great writing but this exchange is lovely and the line is sweet.
As someone who has grieved many people I thought the line was cynical trash that reads like a tumblr quote. Now we have to act like hallmark card level writing in children’s shows are Alice fucking Walker
This was one of the single worst most cynical shows of all time. I cannot believe anyone felt genuine emotion in this, it makes me depressed, stuff like this honestly makes me feel like life isnt worth living sometimes.
When anthony bourdain talked about feeling emptiness over a bad hamburger and it depressing him for a week, people praising this complete dogshit product makes me think that there really is nothing left idk
What is grief? It’s what the Internet gives you, if you said something mildly offensive 13 years ago.
What is grief? A miserable little pile of love!! BUT ENOUGH TALK, HUGS FOR YOU!!
Limited series is arguably the most competitive writing category with truly outstanding shows and the fact that WandaVision got 3 of 5 nominations is seriously fucked.It’s like “The Mandalorian” getting WGA noms. Whatever you think about that show, no one can possibly argue it’s actually well-written.
I could, but only in the same way that Anthony Hopkins was “appropriately” nominated for Best Actor on Silence of the Lambs. It ain’t the writers’ or Hopkins’ fault the narrative called for a general absence of the thing they provide, and the support of everything around them made them shine more than their actual contributions. In the case of Mandalorian, it’s the sort of show that makes me wish there were awards for Best Storyboarding instead of Best Writing.
It aint the writers fault they received nominations for mediocre work, but I certainly blame the WGA and the TV Academy for their ridiculous overpraise of this middling shows.
SIR. As a mediocre-to-okay person who benefits by comparison to crap, I identify strongly with The Mandalorian, and simply will not hear these absolutely reasonable critiques!
More seriously, it was fun and felt like a Star War. I ain’t trying to defend the writing; simply that, in a bizarre way, it’s somewhat ancillary to the success of the show. Which, to stipulate your feelings on the subject for the sake of argument, was probably a good thing considering what we got, hehehe. The WGA probably just felt they needed to recognize/look partially responsible for that success, but it’s hard to give an award for “best monologue in a series with bad pacing” or “best scene without dialogue” when you’re a writer’s guild.
These are not excuses, merely potential explanations.
As a mediocre to okay person myself, I strive to seek out greatness in other areas, by consuming media that is far more impressive than I am in every respect.
I truly wanted to love “The Mandalorian”, but, at least initially, I found it only fitfully entertaining and at least a little disappointing.The show did get better, but is still deficient in many key areas, notably characterization, dialogue, pacing, etc.
It is very impressive in all of its non-writing areas, to be sure. (aside from the janky Luke CGI. Still looks awful to me.)
(that said, most of the time, a “great scene without dialogue” is still writing and deserves to be credited to the writers. In Mando’s case, it’s probably 99% the work of the craftsman. Based on the laziness of Favreau’s writing, the script probably merely said, “Spiders attack!” and then we got a 15 minute sequence of spiders attacking.)
I never got the dismissive backlash to this line. Of course the sentiment has been said before, in different words. The beauty of art is that a lot of its messages are universal—not every piece of art has to touch everyone the same way.Just let people like things!
problem with online film discourse these days is that tons of people are just speaking in superlatives, so everything is the best ever. at the same time a lot of these people seem to only know marvel movies so their whole frame of reference is nothing but marvel movies. the amount of times i had to read “ngl getting wanda vibes from this” on some totally unrelated media is just mindblowing. so of course there is a natural desire to push back on this, to show these people that ‘no, this is not the best ever. other media outside of marvel exists’and then a line like this comes along, pretty much ripped off from jamie anderson, and probably ridiculed if it would’ve shown up in any other show and it gets declared “the most supreme line ever written” you can’t just help and roll your eyes at the usual twitter wankfest over some mediocrity.
Grief is the children locked away in their rooms for weeks on end. Made to stand still until summoned to actually act like regular humans whenever Wanda feels like it. Grief is knowing you can’t help your children, while not in control of your own body… made to beg when finally given a chance to breathe again. I really hope Wanda gets what is coming to her, it is horrible that this part of the MCU is just glossed over for one person’s feelings.
It was a great line, but I’ll never understand the people who thought it was the best line ever, or the people or thought it was garbage. It was, simply, a well-written line deserving of praise.
The internet tends to be pretty hyperbolic. Everything that’s good is the best thing ever. Everything with flaws is an irredeemable stain on the genre it represents. Especially, I think, a lot of the best ever types are probably younger fans who haven’t been exposed to a whole lot of media and they had an emotional reaction to something that they haven’t personally had before, so they overstate. Then other people come in because there’s nothing the twitter likes to do better than dunk on people.
Younger/newer fans also just really love the stuff they love and love to show it at 100%. The exuberance can be a little much sometimes, but the jaded response is so much more instantly tiresome.
I suspect the first episode starts with the scene from ROTJ at the Sarlacc pit. ILM probably fixed the scene where Han hits Boba and his jetpack thrusters come on. That fx looked bad. When the scene is over. We see Boba inside the Sarlacc’s stomach & we see how he escapes.
This has already been explained in-canon. The Sarlacc consumed a bunch of burning debris from the sail barge. This caused it to vomit up its own stomach and die, something seen in nature on occasion.The armor and Boba got separated in the process. We don’t know exactly why he took it off in the first place, but it got picked up before he could retrieve it.
Assuming they go that route.
They already did. It’s in one of the canon novels. Until they contradict that, it’s what happened.
That doesn’t make much sense to me, since Boba was in the pit long before the barge (though obviously the Sarlaaac has slow digestion) and it seems to be having the armor on would have been the only thing that actually protected him.
Again we don’t know why he and his armor got separated, but we do know why he survived.
That would be terrible. No one needs to see that.
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It’s a good line. In a hundred years, people will be sharing holomemes attributing it to Kurt Vonnegut.
There are lines in movies, TV, or books where, when you hear/read it, it just seems so perfectly stated. Those lines that completely and concisely encapsulate a thought or emotion. Bettany’s simple and gentle delivery really nailed it, which is another reason I think it stood out to people.
So many people are fighting against superlative strawmen here.