Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. To Get More Marvel Universe-Centric, Hints Loeb

One of the biggest, most persistent criticisms of Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. is that it doesn’t particularly feel like it’s set in the Marvel Cinematic Universe and that when such references do come along, they feel a bit forced and out of place.Well, Marvel Television honcho Jeph Loeb hinted in a new interview with Wired (via CBM) that all that is likely to change soon.”Wouldn’t that be fun?” Loeb responded when asked whether the show will tie into Thor: The Dark World, which opens Friday in Europe and here in the U.S. next week. “Look, it’s never been done before, which is kind of incredible when you think about how many dramas and how many big movies have been out there. There certainly have been television shows that have been spin-offs from movies, but to have an ongoing, ever-changing mythology which is happening first in the comics, and then in the motion pictures, and the movies are coming out at a rate of two a year — these giant tent-pole films that are reaching a billion dollars at the box office, which means that that mythology is being shared around the world. For us to tell stories that exist with not only similar characters, but often shared characters — beginning with Clark Gregg as Agent Coulson — sometimes we have to be very careful. We have to dance between raindrops. But other times, if we know something is going to happen: Can we use that? Can we make that have an impact on the show? And I think we’ll see some of that in a very interesting way.”He added, “I think folks know that Titus [Welliver], who played Agent Blake [in the Item 47 One-Shot], is coming up in episode six [on November 5]. The short answer is yes. But we’ve said from the very beginning, we didn’t do the show in order to make an Easter Egg farm. We want to make sure that if there are going to be characters, things, winks, that come from anywhere, whether it’s the regular mythology of the comics or the Marvel cinematic universe, that it works within the story. That we’re not doing it just to do it. When I look at Cobie [Smulders]’s appearance in the pilot as Maria Hill, it was really important that the person who reintroduced Coulson into the world was Maria Hill. We needed someone who had the gravitas of one of the major characters from the [Avengers] movie being able to say, ‘There’s a secret, and we’re not going to be able to share that secret with you, but we’re going to take you on the journey with us.’…The same kind of thing [happened] when we talked about Sam Jackson being on the show. There were obviously a number of places that we thought Nick Fury would have a big impact on the show, but the more we talked about it, [we wanted] was to get him in very early, so that it would kind of christen the show, legitimize it in its own way. And when Sam generously agreed to do the show, there was a moment where, for people who watch the show, it was the wowest of wow they could imagine.”