You would think that a show by Joss Whedon, the man responsible for Buffy, Angel, Firefly, Doll House and the Avengers which is based around our favorite secret agency and starring the Son of Coul would be something pretty awesome, well you’d be dead wrong for thinking that.
I wasn’t that particularly excited for the show in the months leading up to its release, in fact it took me two days to realize the premiere aired so that should give you some idea of how much I gave a damn about it. Even though I wasn’t particularly excited, going into the first two episodes I was expecting at the very least a good show given the fact it’s freaking Joss Whedon doing it but sadly all of the potential is wasted and we now have CSI: S.H.I.E.L.D.
The premise of the show is that following the Battle of New York, the world is slowly changing into the Marvel Universe we know from the comics and because of this more super powered people are popping up along with some secret agencies like S.H.I.E.L.D. who want to use them for their own devious purposes and it’s up to the resurrected Coulson and his team to stop them.
The angle of the world changing due to the presence of aliens, super heroes and gods is one of the few good things going for the show. It lets us see how people react to the fact beings like these exist and how every day life is changing because of them. Its a very cool idea that gets executed fairly well and I like that we do have something that’s on-going in this universe so we can see these changes where the movies most likely wouldn’t have much time to explore it.
Ward and Melinda May are the other two of the shows strengths. Ward is a younger agent who firmly believes in the ends justify the means mentality and he realistically knows what kind of profession this is, May on the other hand is a veteran of the job who has, following a petty bad mission, tried to get out of job but gets pulled back in by Coulson. These two say it like it is and they don’t try to pretend they aren’t liars and killers working for more liars and killers which instantly puts them above the rest of the cast.
Everything else on the show ranges from pretty bad to meh. The whole show feels like a Disney XD live action show in terms of the production values and writing. Except Melinda May and Ward, all of the characters just act like these snarky high school kids who try to be funny but it just comes off as annoying and cringe worthy. Fitz and Simmons are just generic, fast talking scientist number 1 and 2, Skye is generic anarchist hacker with facial expressions so annoying you want to just smack her across the face and Coulson whose the idealistic moron of the team.
Coulson is probably the worst of all the characters for me because the dude is another veteran spy and yet he constantly acts like it’s a game or something. He comes off like that young rookie who wants to do the right thing in a job all about doing the wrong things for the greater good, but he has at least 20 years experience on this job and it makes no sense that he stills acts and thinks this way.
One of the lines in Avengers that resonated for me the most and what should have been the basis of the whole show was the fact spies are liars and killers in service to liars and killers. That’s the S.H.I.E.L.D. show I wanted too see, I wanted a show where you can see the seedy underbelly of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and where we can see just how far S.H.I.E.L.D. is willing to go to get the job done.
The life of a spy is one full of backstabbing, lying and killing and a show about a secret agency whose members are well known liars and killers shouldn’t be some CSI rip off with characters who act like snarky teenagers. The potential was there to (FINALLY) do something more serious with the MCU and they either weren’t allowed to do it or just wanted another thing spun out of the Avengers where you have tons of snarky quips from the characters that’s not funny in the least like it was in Avengers.
Lets face it, Marvel movies are most likely going to keep devolving into quasi-comedy bullshit like Iron Man 3 and Thor 1 and were not going to get a movie like Iron Man 1 that was able to perfectly blend fun and serious, so to balance out the quasi-comedy bullshit of the movies you could have had a show that caters to the people who want a more serious MCU related product, but instead we now have the same bullshit in a weekly TV format.
Going back to the production values, they are laughably pathetic. The jet looks good the first time you see it but any time its in the air its this poorly rendered CGI blob thing that looks it got ripped out a video game cinematic circa 1999. The hand to hand action is done well enough but any time there’s a shoot out the camera focus on the characters and you just watch them aim their guns at good knows where and shooting at good knows what. There are plenty of other shows that have been able to make a shoot out look good on TV and this just pales in comparison to those.
If you really need a good spy show watch 24 or the Americans, they perfectly show just what the life of a spy is like without sugar coating it and they are leaps and bounds more entertaining than this CSI knock off, hell if you really need an investigation show or something watch the 50 billion versions of CSI on the air or Castle or Bones, I can guarantee you most if not all of them are at the very least marginally better than AoS.
FINAL VERDICT: D-
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