Author: Marc Bernardin

“Arrow”

It’s probably safe to say that when Arrow premiered in October 2012, expectations were moderate. Even though archers had been making a comeback — thanks to The Avengers’ Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner) and The Hunger Games’ Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) — Green Arrow was never high on fans’ most-want-to-see-on-television list. And Oliver Queen as a character always felt a bit like Batman’s spoiled cousin: Rich kid goes through trauma, trains in the far East, returns to his city to lead his family’s corporation while donning a mask to fight crime.

But Arrow came out of the gate swinging — and it doesn’t hurt when you have a guy with Stephen Amell’s abs working out with his shirt off, like, every episode. It recast Queen and his cast of characters in interesting ways. It gave him real trauma — five years on an island, tormented by the death of his father and the young woman he dragged with him on a doomed pleasure cruise — and real drama. He was driven, haunted, and when he finally made it back to Starling City, he was a stranger in his own land. And it all worked. The producers leaned into the Green Arrow mythos, took what they wanted and left the rest. So we got classic comics characters like Black Canary, Deathstroke, Deadshot, Count Vertigo, the Huntress…even the Royal Flush Gang. They went deep, and it paid off. The world is rich, the characters have depth, the stories have emotion and pathos, and things blow up real good. By arrows with explosives on ’em.

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Which is, really, more than anyone can say for any other live-action superhero show, well, ever. (You will note that I’m specifically saying “live-action,” as Batman: The Animated Series and Justice League would duke it out atop that list.) Of course, the competition isn’t all that fierce: The ’60s Batman, Wonder Woman, M.A.N.T.I.S., The Flash, The Incredible Hulk, The Amazing Spider-Man, Blade, Superboy, Birds of Prey, even Smallville. Some of them may have had their moments — after all, in 11 seasons, Smallville would have to, simply by the law of averages, deliver some entertaining television — but none of them have sustained a real, consistent quality.

You’ll notice that I didn’t include Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD in that list. It is still finding its footing, locating its voice. But where Arrow is telling a serialized story, driven by emotion, starring a diverse cast of characters, each of which has their own motivations and scars, Agents of SHIELD…isn’t. By design. It’s as though SHIELD is running away from its comic-book roots instead of finding ways to embrace them, while subverting them.

Could Agents of SHIELD find its way? Will Daredevil, Jessica Jones, Iron Fist and Luke Cage be what viewers want them to be? Sure. If Marvel lets them.

Marvel may rule the big screen — and Thor: The Dark World is set to conquer this weekend — but Arrow is single-handedly winning the superhero-TV space.

E-mail: Marc.Bernardin@THR.com
Twitter: @marcbernardin

ABC

[Warning: This contains spoilers from Tuesday night’s episode of Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD.]

We’ve spent three episodes with Coulson’s ragtag band of go-getters, waiting for them to go and get a show worth Season Pass-ing. And, finally…

This Is How We Do It

The best Joss Whedon shows are about family. (Yes, you could say all Joss Whedon shows are about family, but no matter how many times Adele would refer to her “house,” nothing about the Dollhouse cast felt familial.) But every family has its share of friction, of static. There is always going to be the goofy brother (Xander) or the uncle no one likes but keeps inviting to dinner (Jayne) or the vampire that got his soul back and really likes punching puppets (Spike). But families — especially when everyone is grown — never get along all of the time.

And one of the problems of the first three episodes of Agents of SHIELD was that the ad hoc family that Joss and Jed of the House of Whedon, and Maurissa Tancheroen (who married into the House of Whedon), created had no tension. Everyone liked each other, well enough. Skye and Ward were so thin as characters, that what differences they had didn’t register. And no one challenged Coulson’s leadership – save Nick Fury (Samuel J. Jackson), in a cameo.

But with this episode (written by Jeffrey Bell; and the first not written by someone related to Joss), this show feels the way it should. There was real conflict within the team, specifically between Melinda May (Ming-na Wen) and Coulson. The “monster of the week” was new and different and personal and horrific – the girl with the X-ray eyes, Akela Amadour (Pascale Armand). The plotting was fast, smart and surprising. Skye (Chloe Bennet) had an actual reason to be involved in the drama (even if her, “Hey, A.C. … here’s where I’m gonna come into your office, drop some unrequested character backstory and then leave,” was kind of ridiculous). There was a hint of a real Big Bad, aside from the always-ludicrous Rising Tide, which Agents of SHIELD has been sorely lacking.

And Clark Gregg’s Agent Coulson was at the center of the action, where he should be, and the episode revolved around him as he revisited past sins in ways that forced May to call him on his bullshit.

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If I had to pick nits, here are a mere couple:

I would’ve found the “Ward has to seduce a burly Russian” far more interesting if he actually had to seduce the burly Russian. Why isn’t that a legitimate thing that spies would have to deal with? And why couldn’t Ward have done it in a fashion that doesn’t scream of gay panic? Don’t play it for humor, don’t play the “Ewww, I had to kiss a guy!” — and it would’ve sold Ward as the professional operator he keeps claiming to be.

I know it’s something they’re saving, but I really wanted someone with X-ray vision to take a good look at Coulson. They intimate as much when Akela asks, “He’s different. What did they do to him?” The secret of Coulson isn’t one that can last forever. And, given that the Nerds on the Bus now have X-ray specs, too, it’ll come out eventually. But I was hoping that it’d really start coming out here.

Line of the week comes from Skye: “Did you never learn that boy parts and girl parts are different? And our parts aren’t penises?”

Tune in later to see what the Sage and Fastidious Jim Steranko (@iamsteranko) thought.

E-mail: Marc.Bernardin@THR.com
Twitter: @marcbernardin

ABC/Justin Lubin

Clark Gregg

So, what did we take away from the second adventure of Agent Phil Coulson (Clark Gregg) and his team as they retrieved a tesseract-y relic from Peru and repelled a band of skyjackers?

Skye’s The Limit.

No, seriously, Agents of SHIELD will succeed or fail because of her. As this episode and everyone in it made abundantly clear, Skye (Chloe Bennet) has no real reason for being on Agent Coulson’s team, taking up space in “The Bus.” Ward (Brett Dalton) says it, May (Ming-Na Wen) says it, Hottie McRebel (Leonor Varela) says it…even Nick Fury says it. And what does the woman who “hacked SHIELD with a laptop” bring to the table? So far, precious little hacking. Instead, she tosses off sayings that other people remember and mistake for a plan of action. She notices things and can read. This show needs to figure her out, and fast. And simply dropping wee sinister hints — “I’m in,” she texts to a faceless fellow Rising Tider — isn’t gonna get it done.

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Dancing Around Melinda May.

Ming-Na Wen is, clearly, this show’s secretive weapon. She works the total bad-ass in a way that likely makes Papa Whedon proud. But the producers are going to have to find a way to make her more than her shadowy backstory. There are but so many times dropping lines like “If I ever need a gun, I’ll take one” and referring to her as “the cavalry” can work. She needs to be a bit more like Firefly’s Shepherd Book — possessed of a mysterious past but not entirely defined by it. She actually needs to be a character…not just the absence of one.

Agents of SHIELD Doesn’t Look Small…

There was a refreshing sense of scale to this episode — the Peruvian section looked big and widescreen and not like it was filmed in a section of a park with jungle trees brought in. Sure, it eventually became a bit of a bottle show, with the last half-hour confined to their standing sets, but it came out of the gate like a blockbuster.

…But It Isn’t Thinking Big (Yet).

Shouldn’t this show be, well, nuttier? Second episode out of the gate, and we’re dealing with a shiny box and South American rebels. I know we’re not going to be repelling invasions of alien ice goblins or joining Dr. Strange for a tour of magical dimensions, but if the premise of the show is that, in the wake of Marvel’s heroes appearing the world is getting weird, shouldn’t the things this team encounters be weirder than an old gun that just blows big holes in stuff? Agents of SHIELD needs to unhinge itself, but good, and not just be a procedural.

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Nick Fury Cameo. Good Thing or Bad?

Seeing Samuel L. Jackson in the ol’ eyepatch was a nice little button to the episode — it gave the whole thing a charge that, in truth, it didn’t really earn. And Agents of SHIELD will have to work to be more than a place where you might see a movie star. It needs to make those cameos — and we’re likely to have a bunch more before this first season is over, given that Thor: The Dark World is coming in a month and Captain America: The Winter Soldier hits theaters right in the middle of May 2014 sweeps — icing on an already delicious cake.

Okay, pop back over in a few hours for the Great and Powerful Jim Steranko’s take.

E-mail: Marc.Bernardin@THR.com
Twitter: @marcbernardin