13 Years Ago Today, Marvel Released Its First MCU TV Show (But It Didn’t Hit Its Stride Until It Left the MCU)

It has been 13 years since Marvel released its first show under the Marvel Cinematic Universe banner, but the show really didn’t hit its stride until it broke completely away from the MCU as a whole. The MCU launched with Iron Man in 2008, and that first movie focused on Tony Stark’s (Robert Downey Jr.) origin story and ended with him meeting a man named Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson), who told him about the “Avengers Initiative.” After The Incredible Hulk in 2008, Iron Man 2 brought back a SHIELD agent named Phil Coulson (Clark Gregg), who had a smaller role in the first Iron Man movie. In the second film, he had a bigger role, working for Fury to keep an eye on Iron Man. The sixth movie was The Avengers, and in that film, Loki (Tom Hiddleston) killed Agent Coulson.

Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD premiered the next year, on September 24, 2013, spinning directly off the events of The Avengers movie. With Gregg reprising his role as Agent Coulson, the series opened with the mystery of how he was brought back to life after Loki killed him in The Avengers. However, the story then moved on to show Coulson working within SHIELD to create his own special-ops team, including bringing in an outsider who initially wanted to bring SHIELD’s actions public.

Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD Brought the MCU to TV

Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD premiere episode, “Pilot,” actually started after the events of Iron Man 3, and Maria Hill (Cobie Smulders) reprised her role from the MCU to assign a SHIELD agent named Grant Ward (Brett Dalton) to a new team, one run by Agent Coulson, who walked in alive with no explanation. The team also included Agent Melinda May (Ming-Na Wen), a formerly retired agent who had a history with Coulson. By the end of the first episode, they recruited a woman named Daisy Johnson (Chloe Bennet), who wanted to expose SHIELD using the pseudonym Skye. Two tech agents, Fitz (Iain De Caestecker) and Simmons (Elizabeth Henstridge), rounded out the team.

The first episode reunited Joss Whedon with one of his former stars, J. August Richards (Gunn on Angel), who played Mike Peterson, a man SHIELD was trying to stop. Peterson, who was enhanced with the Extremis serum from Iron Man 3, joined SHIELD as well before an injury took him out of the picture. He later returned as Deathlok. This was a solid start, and the series even brought in some other Marvel villains who got a chance to shine where the movies didn’t allow it, including the Absorbing Man in the second season.

However, Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD struggled for one big reason. It was always held back by the MCU. The show couldn’t do anything that would threaten continuity in the MCU, and this was very pronounced in the first season, where the show even crossed over with the movies. During Captain America: The Winter Soldier, when Hydra was shown to have infiltrated SHIELD, the TV series had to follow the same story, which is when Grant was shown to be part of Hydra and a traitor to his own team. While it was fun to see the team crossing over with movie events, it made the series suddenly feel like viewers had to keep up with too much and made watching it feel like homework. The good news is that the show found a way to fix this in later seasons. Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD left the MCU.

Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD Was at Its Best When It Left the MCU

Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD got off to a great start, but things began to drag when it had to remain beholden to the MCU. There were even two other shows that both suffered because of the homework fatigue that fans felt from watching Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD. While they aren’t tied directly to Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD, both Marvel’s Agent Carter and The Inhumans failed to get great ratings as the follow-ups to Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD. Marvel’s Agent Carter was a great show, despite low ratings. The Inhumans was not, and Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD kept using Inhumans as a race in the show after ABC cancelled that spin-off series.

Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD found a way to fix things, and while the ratings remained low, the critical praise began to rise as the show moved further and further away from the MCU. The Marvel series broke completely away from the MCU at the end of Season 5. That was when the team began a time-travel storyline, and this allowed them to move throughout time, which, as Marvel fans know, put them on alternate Earths in the multiverse.

The timeline split in Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD Season 5 when the team unknowingly created a massive causal time loop and repeated it many times without realizing it. The main break happened in the season finale when Coulson and Daisy stopped a villain named Graviton from destroying the Earth, which severed their reality. As Loki showed, these incidents create a new branch, and Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD was able to go its own way from that point on. The series lasted for two more seasons, and while the ratings remained low, these ended up as some of the best comic book storylines Marvel had ever done to that point.

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