Yes, this is really rather late: Agent Carter was a 2015 ABC series, on the air for only two years - cancelled over three years ago. It was surprisingly unsuccessful, although the generational story analysis gives some indication of what the problem may have been.
If you haven't been here before, please take a look at the Introduction to Generations, the Generational Attributes and the Four Stories in order to get up to speed on how all this works, and the terms being used.
There were only two seasons, and they were done well enough. Not well enough to stick around longer, though. Paradoxically enough, that may have been because it had similarities to Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (and also, perhaps, to Buffy) in that there were season-long arcs, facing down a Big Bad as each ended. There's nothing wrong with that, it's a simple way to enforce a Hero story. And - like Buffy, and Skye & most of the team on the Bus, and Steve Rogers for that matter - Peggy Carter is a member of a Hero generation. Shouldn't she have a Hero story?
This was one of the key insights of looking at this analysis: Heroes have a different sort of story after the Crisis has passed. They are no longer attempting to right wrongs, or create a new world. That time of their life is behind them. They aren't taking on Big Bad, or at least not in the same way. This was fundamental to the best-known espionage stories, from James Bond to (at first) Jack Ryan: The struggle is about keeping the status quo going.
It’s post-war. It’s the First Turning. It should be an Artist story i.e. about the futility of change. Having a season-long Big Bad sort of arc makes it too much about Heroic Success, and that simply doesn’t match with the era. People are avoiding new sacrifices, ignoring previous successes - they want to survive, they embrace the absence of change. Stories where You Can Do It if you just keep plugging along, no longer work as they used to.
And it’s not that Carter can’t make it work that way, it’s that we expect a different sort of result in this new era. Nothing's going to change, she can’t fix anything - with Hydra defeated and the war over, we should be grateful when nothing DOES change. And setting up Carter as a woman who is going to make things happen, well, we have some idea of what SHIELD becomes eventually, and her failure is surprisingly complete.
So don’t try to force her into that Hero garb. Accept that she is going to be unable to make changes. Conversely, accept that the bad guys aren’t going to succeed either.
(It was a truism in spy novels of the era that everything happened behind the scenes, no change to the over-riding narrative - nothing that you did really mattered, because nobody saw a difference. And this was a feature, not a bug.)
(It was a truism in spy novels of the era that everything happened behind the scenes, no change to the over-riding narrative - nothing that you did really mattered, because nobody saw a difference. And this was a feature, not a bug.)
Embrace that, and the first thing to go will be the Big Bad narrative. You have small successes each week, and the big success has to be in the infrastructure build or the discovery made that will enable the next small step. Carter can’t get past the sexism of her era - that won’t change - but she can be the person who makes S.H.I.E.L.D., for better and for worse.
And don’t start saying “but we want her to change it” - it’s a story set in the past, we know she doesn’t change it, pretending that she can is twice as hard for that reason. Just give in and find a different way to go. Get her out of this earth-boiling danger, and make it about building up S.H.I.E.L.D. She’ll have difficulties along the way, she’ll keep finding that people don’t like her in this position: Embrace that, and do it with something more than “A guy tells her she can’t do something, and she sneaks around and does it anyway.”
She’s not building anything here, and that makes it hard to be interested in where she is going.
It’s almost like Agent Carter makes more sense like The West Wing, with minor problems to be overcome and ….and didn’t we want to see how she built up S.H.I.E.L.D? Don't we want to find out who is going to oppose that, and why? How would they do it? How could she outsmart them? That’s not as easy a show to write as Big Bad Intro and Out, but it would work better with where she is at.
(Heck, it’s what she DID in Captain America: She was support, certainly, but that’s why she was effective.)
* How did that secret base that Steve Rogers found get built?
* What did Agent Carter do that earned her equal billing with Howard Stark and Colonel Philips?
* What went so horribly wrong that an organization that started as only Carter and Stark could become infiltrated by Hydra, and eventually destroyed by it?
The way to do this seems obvious: Figure out where you want it to end up in five seasons, then work towards that.That would likely mean working on deep cover, always able to show why what Carter had done was just what they had wanted her to do. Then it becomes about fate and faith and whether it makes sense to put yourself out there to save the world, when it seems to resist any attempts at being saved.
And that doesn't mean it can't have some action, that we can't show her kicking ass and taking names - it just needs to work with what's there. Her actions are actually subversive, then, and also believable and that's more subversive yet.
It would have been more than a period-piece clone of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. These changes - built around the idea that Peggy Carter, sadly, ultimately won't change anything - would yield a story that couldn't be described anywhere else.
It would have been more than a period-piece clone of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. These changes - built around the idea that Peggy Carter, sadly, ultimately won't change anything - would yield a story that couldn't be described anywhere else.
