No new show on TV went into the new season with more anticipation and higher expectations than Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., currently serving as the staple of ABC’s Tuesday night lineup.After opening the series to huge ratings, though, they’ve had a hard time keeping up the enthusiasm, with critics and audiences both bemoaning the fact that it doesn’t particularly feel like it’s set in the Marvel Universe and that, as often as not, nothing much seems to be happening.Now, the first of these criticisms is arguably the great Catch 22 of the series: operating on a TV budget and hoping to keep the focus on an ensemble cast of fully-human characters (especially Coulson, originally designed as a peripheral character in the Marvel Cinematic Universe), it’s virtualy impossible to keep up the pace fans would want in terms of looking and feeling like it belonged shoulder to shoulder with Iron Man 3 and Thor: The Dark World. The series seems to have set out to craft an identity for itself, and that’s fine…but the fact that it hasn’t resonated with a lot of fans is admittedly problematic.A bit like the way Dexter spent its entire final season being unfavorably compared to Breaking Bad, though, things seem even worse for S.H.I.E.L.D. because fans seem to think that Arrow is “doing it right” more in its second season than it was last year, and far better than Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. We have, ourselves, chimed in on this subject.
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