SHIELD: Pilot

You can't really tell from this blog, but I watch a lot of TV. Some might say a scary amount. I love the long form story-telling and character growth that you get to experience watching a TV show grow and evolve over years. I like the anticipation of waiting until the next week to find out what happened. And I like seeing how different shows comment on or fail to comment on a variety of social issues.

My television tastes are wide and varied. I loved silly, escapist TV, like last year's The Carrie Diaries (which I still think has one of the more nuanced and thoughtful depictions of a teenager coming to terms with his sexual orientation), True Blood (vampires and cliffhangers!) or the new show Sleepy Hollow (time-traveling Ichabod Crane! Also one of the most racially diverse casts currently on television). I like happy comedies like How I Met Your Mother (which has a lot of fun playing with structure and time) and Parks and Recreation (honestly, one of the happiest, feel-good TV shows around). I also enjoy some harder-hitting dramas, like Justified and The Americans which deal with, respectively, trying to break free from your parents' legacy and what it takes to make a marriage work.

But I'll always have a soft spot for Joss Whedon's shows. I grew up watching Buffy (and then Angel) every Tuesday night, and made it a point to catch both Firefly and Dollhouse when they were originally airing. I'm beyond excited to have a Whedon show to look forward to on Tuesday night's again, even though Joss' brother and sister-in-law will be more in charge of the day-to-day running of the show. But since that team was responsible for most of my favorite episodes of Dollhouse, I have every confidence in them with this new show.

All of this brings us to the point. I've sort of been wanting to talk about TV on this blog like I do with books. I watch way too much to comment on everything (that would be a full time job). But I figure I can handle a single series pretty easily. And what better series than Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (hereafter, SHIELD)? I'm sure there will be some cool things to talk about as the series progresses.

But for now we just have the pilot. I've gotten the impression that I'm more pleased with this show than a lot of people. I think disappointment was to be expected, though. There was so much hype since this was announced, that there was just no way it could live up to those expectations. Add in to that the fact that Joss Whedon, Jed Whedon, Maurissa Tancharoen, Marvel, Disney, ABC, and probably countless other people all had a vested interest in their vision for this show and you end with something that was perhaps a little too broad. When you also consider the fact that Whedon is historically pretty bad at pilots (Firefly being the exception), and the show can only get better. (Hopefully.)

So yeah, I'm pretty optimistic. There are some strong characters here and hints about backstories that will help flesh out the walking stereotypes we saw in the pilot. Agent Ward has some serious family issues. Something happened to drive Melinda May away from fieldwork. It was heavily implied that Skye erased her own identity for some reason. And there's the central mystery of how Coulson was resurrected (maybe Tahiti really is a magical place). When the show gets a little room to breathe and finds its focus, I bet we'll end up with something excellent.

Of course, I genuinely enjoyed the pilot, too. Sure, J August Richard's character had some pretty awful dialogue. His speech at the train station was too broad and obvious, likewise his scene at the factory. Neither had that Whedon flavor that I've become so enamored of over the years. But his line about living out his origin story made me laugh. And Skye's insistence that "With great power comes...a lot of weird stuff" was a nice call to the fact that the Avengers legally have to separate themselves from Spiderman.

The thing I'm most interested in seeing developed is the antagonism between Skye and Ward, which will, of course stand, in for the transparency vs security debate. Whedon is aware that with the recent trial of Private Chelsea Manning and the whole Edward Snowden debacle, this is very much in the forefront of a lot of people's minds. And he has the perfect vehicle with which to explore it. Then again, this is also the part of the show that I can see falling completely apart.

Whedon is anti-establishment. This has been a theme in his work as early as Buffy (with Buffy fighting against big bads like The Mayor and Adam/The Initiative, and ultimately rejecting The Watcher's Council). Mal Reynolds was fighting against The Alliance (Big Government) while Echo and her friends were taking a stand against Rossum (Big Corporation). Even in The Avengers, there are hints that S.H.I.E.L.D. isn't the altruistic organization it claims to be.

The show, however, has to do its best to make S.H.I.E.L.D. the goods guys. Or at least, Coulson and his team. They're the protagonists that we need to be rooting for, and I want to see lots of coll superheroes and superhero-related shenanigans. Whedon is going to have to find some middle ground between the individual and the establishment. He's going to need to get better about articulating Ward's and Coulson's sides in this debate, so that Skye can reasonably justify working with them.

Ultimately, I worry that this will become a rehash of Angel's fifth season. Don't get me wrong; I love Angel's fifth season. In my opinion it's the best season of that show. But I want to see something different from SHIELD, something more nuanced than good guys vs bad guys. S.H.I.E.L.D. may be shady, but it's no Wolfram and Hart, and I'd hate to see it become that over the course of this show. So here's hoping we get some interesting morally grey area and good debate about the need for secrecy in some cases versus the right to knowledge in others. Where should that line be drawn and who ought to decide that? That's what I'm hoping to be able to talk about with this show.

That and the adorableness of Simmons. Did you see her face when she welcomed Ward to the team? Or when the alien tech actually started dripping? I can already tell she's going to be my favorite, even if I have trouble understanding half of what she says. That's what subtitles are for, though, right?