Shield was a lot of moving parts.
Guys like you with a heart.
Now you'll be the head.
At one point, the filmmakers behind the MCU seemed to be positioning
Nick Fury as the beating heart of the interconnected tapestry of films.
And yet it was Clark Gregg's agent Coulson
that captured the hearts and minds of Phase one fans.
So when it came time for Marvel to start rolling out TV projects,
why didn't they pick Nick Fury
to be the protagonist of the show focused on the exploits of Shield?
Especially when Coulson was
literally dead.
These were in full Coulson's jacket.
Yes. He never did get you to sign them.
In the early days of the MCU, Nick Fury played effortlessly
by Sam Jackson and his shield
organization, were the main way the filmic universe was woven together.
Fury seemed to be the lynchpin in all of it.
Second, it only by his right hand man, a shield agent named Coulson.
Throughout the first phase of MCU films, Coulson
was basically just an expository device.
But fans took to him.
So when he was dispatched by Loki
in the second act of the initial Avengers, film, fans were very upset,
and yet they wouldn't have to wait that long for Coulson to return.
I'm clearance level six.
I know that Agent Coulson was killed in action.
Welcome to level seven.
After the roaring success of Joss Whedon's The Avengers,
the Buffy creator was brought on board at Marvel to act
as a creative consultant on all of their projects.
On August 7th of 2012,
it was announced that Whedon would be involved in the creation of a TV
project based on the highly secretive governmental agency known as SHIELD.
Now, for the sake of clarity.
Shield in the comics and shield in the MCU are slightly different beasts.
Aside from the fact that their acronym stands
for literally different things, the show incarnation moves
decidedly away from the Black Ops governmental agency fairly quickly.
With it being revealed that the SHIELD organization has been
secretly purported by Hydra the whole time,
I thought Hydra was defeated after World War Two.
Hydra always comes back, cut off ahead.
Two more will take its place at the time of the show's production.
Kevin Feige, his film division and the television division were feuding,
meaning that continuity could only travel one way down.
Thus, the major changes in the filmic universe
could affect the shows, but never the other way around.
And this logic also restricted shows like Agent Carter and Shield
in their access to marquee names like Nick Fury.
Obviously, in a perfect world, Fury would have been the protagonist.
But even in this more restricted scenario, Fury
should have been the man in the shadows, constantly working behind the scenes.
He should have been the deus ex machina.
Or at the very least, he should have been the character
supervising the team of SHIELD agents that we follow on a week to week basis.
And yet in the show, he's only in two episodes
out of seven seasons, both of which happened in the first season.
The last time you'll be seeing the full stretch.
You're going to disappear.
Nowhere to be found.
The Nick Fury in the films and the Nick Fury in the comics
are significantly different entities.
Nick Fury in the comics is a Caucasian man who rose to fame during World War Two,
who has been given an experimental serum dubbed the Infinity Formula
and is virtually immortal.
While the film version of him only retains his duplicitous yet
heroic man behind the curtain attitude, So that begs the question
why wasn't Nick Fury, the protagonist of Agents of Shield?
Considering the comic book that this was based on is Nick Fury, Agent of Shield?
Well, there's a few things here.
One, the logistical hurdles
of getting Sam Jackson into a network TV show were high, too.
The previously mentioned film and TV show Division's conflict.
Three Coulson was the fan favorite character, and finally, four
We didn't had just killed Coulson off in the first Avengers film.
So bringing him back in this TV show allowed him to make a big splash
almost immediately.
You were dead for days.
That's impossible.
Director Fury moved heaven and earth.
But none of those reasons deal with the fact that Agents of Shield
is a big show.
Conceptually that never quite lives up to its potential.
The constant end of the world threats, the deaths and rebirths of characters
and the secret time travel plots all feel unwieldy and too far
reaching for the narrative canvas that the characters can supply.
Agent Coulson being the prime example of this in his initial conception.
Coulson was just a bureaucrat, a middle management pencil pusher.
But Clark Gregg did such a fantastic job with this role that he charmed
audiences and Whedon and willed himself into more and more screen time.
So when he's brought back
and given this insane alien resurrection backstory and multiple heroic
sacrifices on a subconscious level, it just never sits right.
Sacrificing himself to give Daisy Johnson the serum
she needs to defeat a supervillain or making a deal with the devil
to become the ghostwriter to save his friends.
Those feel like fury moves.
You can't kill me.
Maybe not, but I'm pretty sure he can.
And therein lies
the true problem with agents of Shield's patriarch,
the show's creators, Weeden, his brother Jed Whedon, and Marissa
Sharon never truly came up with an idea for how to use
Coulson other than just writing him as baby Nick Fury.
And Clark Gregg is a great actor, but he just isn't Sam Jackson.
When asked about the character in a 2013 interview with Entertainment Weekly,
Whedon said the idea of Coulson as the long suffering bureaucrat
who deals with Tony Stark's and suffer ability is delightful
and hits the core of something I'm almost writing about all the time.
The little guy versus the big, faceless organization.
And that's what Clark Gregg embodies the everyman.
That's exactly the issue.
Coulson is an everyman in his MCU film appearances,
and then when he's resurrected for the small screen,
they try to pivot him into being the new theory without ever
really setting up the narrative infrastructure to support that change.
We are not agents of nothing.
We are agents of SHIELD,
and that has to carry weight after everything we've been through.
That carries weight.
That lack of forethought and inventiveness extends to the show
Agents of SHIELD as a whole.
Anyone who's read the comics knows that the show should have been an adventure
of the Week spy show with an overarching Hydra plot running in the background.
In fact, longtime Nick Fury, agent of SHIELD writer artist Jim
Renko, was so frustrated by the early seasons of the show
that he wrote an op ed for The Hollywood Reporter, calling the show
the perfect example of frustration, apathy and disappointment.
This lack of vision for the show can be seen in just how often
they rebooted itself, which was basically every season over its seven season run.
It tried to make the Inhumans a thing, pivoted to Ghost Writer for a season,
then went to space, then did time travel, then did more time travel.
I mean, I knew it wasn't really in black and way, but still,
now I know how he felt.
It's a blast from the past.
So how could agents of SHIELD have been fixed?
Well, the first step really could have been
just incorporating fury into the cast in some way,
even if he was the Skinner to Coulson and Mays, Mulder and Scully.
That would have helped build a narrative hierarchy that could have enabled Coulson
to grow and develop into a protagonist as opposed to the bizarre immediate jump
that he undergoes from the beginning of the show overall.
Agents of Shield is a bland and somewhat disappointing viewing experience
that could have been great if just a few minor tweaks were made.
The rift between the two silos of the MCU is the ultimate villain in this story,
as many of the creative character and visual choices the show made were
in direct response to the things the movie side was doing, and tragically,
a high concept that is tailor made for a serialized TV show was squandered.
But as we know from Coulson's many Deaths and Resurrections,
nothing stays dead forever. So who knows?
Perhaps there's a new Disney Plus streaming
show that will feature the Shield cast just around the corner.
And maybe this time it'll be good. And well.
That's all we have for this episode. What do you think?
What was the best part of agents of Shield?
Let us know down in the comments below
and as always, like and subscribe for more videos just like this one.