Strike two for Marvel TV. FATWS was no better than Wandavision. It was slightly more coherent and less contrived, but it was overfull on ripped-from-the-headlines racial hectoring (isn't everything?) and the politics of it were utterly infantile. Poor Anthony Mackie was given a speech even Chris Evans couldn't have made inspirational. Honestly, the dialogue on this show was insipid. Wyatt Russell (I miss Lodge 49) and Sebastian Stan did the best they could with their lame material. Julia Louis-Dreyfus had a great cameo and some good lines. Maybe she got notes from Larry David and pretended to improv them.
The major problems it suffers from are the same ones Wandavision suffered from.
It's distracted by the need to set up future movies, this causes events to be forced and feel unnatural.
It's not a TV show, it's a very long movie sliced into six pieces -- the cadences are all off. The final episode was jarringly structured, it seemed to be missing an act somewhere.
Most importantly, the main characters are still not leads and the actors portraying them are not the charismatic ones with perfect comic timing that we have come to expect from Marvel. The standout performance was from Daniel Bruhl as Zemo.
The upcoming Loki has Tom Hiddleston and Owen Wilson, so #3 should not be a problem. We'll see if they sort out the rest.
Aside: I've been spot binging a couple of old shows: Made Men and Sopranos. It's amazing how fast and far TV has fallen. We used to have Sopranos, The Wire, and Deadwood, all going at the same time. Now we can't even have a third season of Lodge 49, we're waiting forever for the final Better Call Saul, and we're reduced to hoping a Marvel show will at least be reasonably entertaining. Probably time to go back to reading.
