Author: Marc Bernardin

Kelsey McNeal/ABC

“Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD’

[Spoilers for the events in Captain America: The Winter Soldier abound. Consider this fair warning.]

You know how, in standard movie and comic-book hype, the line is always “After this … NOTHING WILL EVER BE THE SAME”? The tail end of Captain America: The Winter Soldier lives up to it, as Steve Rogers (Chris Evans), Natasha Romanov (Scarlet Johansson), Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie), Maria Hill (Cobie Smulders) and Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) expose and then destroy SHIELD — the nigh-omnipresent government espionage agency tasked with securing America from global and extra-global threats.

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Why? Because it had been infiltrated by Hydra, the same Nazi division that Captain America took down during World War II. But it never went away; instead it infected SHIELD, from the lowest agents to the top of the pyramid, Alexander Pierce (Robert Redford).

So how will this affect a show that happens to be called Agents of SHIELD? What will happen to Phil Coulson (Clark Gregg)? The Hollywood Reporter turned to the show’s executive producers/showrunners, Jed Whedon and Maurissa Tancharoen, who were only too happy to finally be able to talk about “the H word.”

What is, exactly, the H word?

Jed Whedon: Hydra. After months and months of silence.

How far into the planning of Agents of SHIELD did you know what would happen in Captain America: The Winter Soldier?

Maurissa Tancharoen: From the very beginning. We had the order to do a series about SHIELD and, literally, a day or two after that they said, “Oh, by the way, there’s a movie coming up that will affect your show.”

Whedon: “Here, read this script.”

Tancharoen: “Read this script, and you’ll see what we’re talking about.”

Was there ever a discussion of whether or not you guys would have to play by those rules, or was it always a foregone conclusion?

Whedon: The great thing about the Marvel Universe is that it’s one universe. So, that’s the thing that makes it exciting. And that’s the opportunity we were given. And so this was obviously something we would have to incorporate. Right away, we saw both the challenges it posed and the opportunities it would bring.

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The disbanding of SHIELD is an event that it would seem there’s no going back from. Is there a way to still do the kind of procedural stories we saw earlier in this first season.

Tancharoen: Now that there’s sort of the overall big bad that’s revealed, there’s differently a procedural approach to taking down those factions that exist within SHIELD.

Whedon: It obviously is a game-changer. But people will have to tune in to see exactly how the game is changed.

Clearly, this will have to change Coulson’s mandate. He’s no longer going to be investigating weird stuff…

Whedon: Coulson’s already had a rough year. The organization that he devoted his life to has lied to him. He’s always known that secrets are a big part of it but he started to pay a price for that. This is a heavy blow. One, it’s a huge punch he’ll have to roll with in some way. We had exploring the affect it would have on him and other members of the team.

Winter Soldier is the first Marvel movie that didn’t have Coulson in it. Do you have a sense of when Coulson will reintroduce himself to the Avengers, or is that just waiting for Avengers: Age of Ultron?

Tancharoen: That’s always a possibility. There’s also the possibility of other characters from our show having a place in a Marvel film. Right now, our show is designed to stand on its own, with Coulson at the center. With everything that happened in Captain America 2 we are dealing with details and the personal and emotional fallout. That’s the great thing about the Marvel  Universe: you can always interweave at some point.

Not many, if any shows, have gone through this kind of radical change. What there anything you looking at for guidance? Any playbooks you wanted to get a peek at to see how that handled?

Whedon: We were sort of doing something new. Integrating with films is something I don’t know if any TV show has done to the extent we are and plan to. The thing that’s so fun about Marvel is the thing that makes it very challenging and why it’s been successful and they’ve met that challenge with a lot of foresight. They’ve been really creative in the way that they’ve slowly built this thing that’s all tied together. Now, we are a part of that, but we’re also telling stories every week. I don’t know if there was an example to follow. We just try and keep in communication with features and try to tell our own stories that live on their own but also can be reflected and enhanced by the films.

Tancharoen: We’ve always said that the movies are about the big, giant crushing of buildings, and our television show is the opportunity to tell the stories of the people whose buildings are being crushed.

Given the size and sweep of this change, is there anything about the show as we know it that’s sacred? Is there anything immune to the fallout?

Whedon: It’ll still be 43 minutes long.

Tancharoen: On Tuesdays at 8.

Whedon: “Nothing is sacred” is an important thing, so there’s jeopardy at all times.

Tancharoen: It’s safe to say that there will be a shift.

What’s the most exciting part of all this?

Whedon: We’ve been very excited about this part of the season for a very long time, and we’re excited it’s all gonna air back-to-back.

Tancharoen: I think it’s thrilling for us for people to finally be able to see it. I mean, we’ve known about this from the outset. The whole season was built towards this. We started very standalone, planting seeds, and that will pay off in the back half. Everything was sort of shaped and structured for this part of the season, for this link-up with the film, so these last six episodes, we’re really thrilled for people to see.

HBO

We live in the Age of the Spoiler. Today’s Internet seems to exist for only two reasons: GIFs of Tom Hiddleston playing with kittens and to reveal every piece of information about a movie or TV show as soon as humanly possible. Script leaks, casting rumors, costume tests, long-lens on-set photos, bootleg trailers, torrented screeners … There are whole industries that thrive on the dissemination of information that shouldn’t be disseminated.

And in the geekosphere, it’s even worse. Generations of feeling that nothing has been created for “us” — of being ignored by the mainstream and forced to trade fragments of salient information via newsletters, fanzines and bulletin boards — has given way to a rabid sense of entitlement. Like Veruca Salt, we want to know and we want to know now.

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Everyone wants to know who’s in the new Star Wars movies, or what’s in Quentin Tarantino’s Hateful Eight script, or what’s happening on the Avengers: Age of Ultron set. And what’s more, the darker corners of the Internet — which, to be honest, is most corners of the Internet — take great pleasure in being the ones to spoil. Knowing a secret is not nearly as fun as spilling it.

Which is what makes the attitudes surrounding Game of Thrones all the more astounding.

There seems to be an unwritten compact surrounding the show based on George R.R. Martin’s epic saga: Nobody say anything.

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Witness the mania that swept the population surrounding the infamous Red Wedding sequence from last season’s “Rains of Castamere” episode. The events of the Red Wedding first appeared in A Storm of Swords, the third in Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire series, which was published in 2000. That information had been sitting there, unmolested, for 13 years before the episode aired. The book was translated into 25 foreign languages. The world knew what was going to happen … but didn’t say a word.

And it’ll happen again. There’s a thing coming, early in the fourth season of Game of Thrones, that is momentous in its both shock and affect. And when I saw the screeners, I was amazed, once more, that the Internet didn’t ruin it for me, as it ruins so many other things.

Why?

Maybe it’s because this information isn’t a precious commodity — it’s there for anyone with a decent search engine. (Or Bing, I guess.) Or maybe it’s because those who’ve read the books — and I am steadfastly not one of them — want to vicariously relive these pivotal moments through the eyes of the unsullied. (Which would explain that wave of videos shot by readers when their friends/loved ones first watched the Red Wedding episode. Even Martin quipped, “Now you know why your nerdy friends were depressed 13 years ago.”)

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Or maybe it’s because pop culture gives us so few things to rally around, to bond with on an ongoing basis. Lost was the last great “watercooler” show to hit the airwaves and since then — since streaming, time-shifting and cord-cutting became took hold — TV viewers have been hungry for to share the kind of surprise, horror and joy that great TV can deliver.

And, apparently, when that great TV comes along, we wanna keep it pure.

It’s easy to remember a musical for its songs. That is, after all, what makes a musical different from every other kind of narrative: The characters will shout to the rafters in full throat, revealing things they just can’t speak, because the music gives them leave to lay themselves bare.

And the songs in The Sound of Music are sublime. Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II knew their way around a tune and these numbers — from “My Favorite Things” to “Climb Ev’ry Mountain” to the indefatigable “Do-Re-Mi” — have endured since the Broadway production bowed in 1959 for good reason. But the story lives in the hearts of audiences because of Robert Wise’s 1965 film adaptation starring Julie Andrews and Christopher Plummer as Maria, the would-be nun trying to quench her yearning heart, and Captain Von Trapp, the stoic Austrian unwilling to reignite his. Andrews’ undeniable empathy and Plummer’s prickly sensuality sold that love story to a generation, who’ve since passed it down to every other.

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With their live adaptation of the play, NBC took a big swing for the fences. They spent a reported $9 million on the production and its cavernous set, which had to house the Austrian countryside, the interior of the Nonnberg Abbey, the Von Trapp estate and the arena where the Von Trapp Family Singers stage their final performance (draped in probably one too many Nazi flags). They engaged Craig Zadan and Neil Meron — of NBC’s calamitous Smash — to produce. They got Audra McDonald to bring her pipes. They found a clutch of children who didn’t have (too much) of that child-performer pomp. And they got Carrie Underwood and Stephen Moyer to play the lovers. And, well, whoops.

Because while Underwood can deliver the songs — I’m sure that anyone with the desire to plunge themselves into the American Idol ringer has been singing those songs for most of her life — she doesn’t acquit herself so well when it comes to the carrying the emotional weight of the production. And perhaps it was unfair to ask so much of Underwood, to have to make Maria’s journey in three scant hours — where Andrews had weeks of production — while enduring costume changes and remembering choreography and trying not to look at the prompter and not step on anyone’s lines or feet. Underwood nails the look of a virginal almost-nun, but goes no deeper than that. Blank stares and placid smiles.

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Moyer is a better singer than Russell Crowe, I’ll give him that. But he’s no Hugh Jackman. Or Neil Patrick Harris. Or Taye Diggs. Or even Nathan Fillion. His attempt at conveying an emotional hollowness just reads as mildly constipated, his furrowed eyes and pursed lips doing all the work. He doesn’t look stoic, he just looks clenched.

The production itself came off without a hitch – no easy feat with so many moving parts and opportunities for blown lines or staircase stumbles (oh, how I wished for a staircase stumble to lighten the three hours). The supporting cast was strong: Laura Benanti was appropriately sultry as Elsa Von Hottie, while Christian Borle was appropriately hammy as Max Detweiler and someone should find a way to have McDonald sing audiences into every commercial break. And, while the camerawork — by directors Rob Ashford and Beth McCarthy-Miller (who directed 30 Rock’s live episodes) — made everything still feel a little stagebound, the storytelling was clear.

And yet, without Underwood and Moyer selling us on this legendary love story, The Sound of Music Live plays like very expensive karaoke.