How the Marvel Cinematic Universe Left Its TV Side Behind

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Next month, the Marvel Cinematic Universe celebrates a grand achievement—just a week after the release of Avengers: Infinity War, it will have been 10 years since Iron Man hit theaters on May 2, 2008. Five years after Marvel effectively created its Cinematic Universe, the company’s TV division launched an equally bold venture: a plan to bring the movie’s universe to the small screen.

Starting with Agents of SHIELD—which would bring then movie-supporting character (in true comic book media style, he got better) Agent Phil Coulson to ABC—Marvel fleshed out its cinematic universe with a series of TV programs that, while standalone, would all be considered canonically part of the same universe as the movies. In the five years since, Marvel’s TV output has grown hugely—SHIELD is currently wrapping up a fifth season, Agent Carter and Inhumans have come and gone, and the company branched out to streaming with the debuts of the Defenders collection of shows on Netflix, and then Runaways on Hulu. There’s plenty more on the way too, with Cloak and Dagger just months away, and a slew of shows currently in the works like The New Warriors.

But even as Marvel’s TV universe has grown from strength to strength, something that was there at the start seems inconspicuously absent now, especially as Marvel Studios touts the great unity of its disparate movie superstars coming together for Avengers: Infinity War. The connection between Marvel TV and Marvel Movies as a cohesive universe has been stretched thinner and thinner—if not outright ignored—as the production headache of trying to line up different shows with different styles and different audiences on different networks has grown.

Marvel’s mantra used to be that of its live-actions works, “It’s all connected!”But that’s not a phrase the company has uttered in a long, long time. Now, if there’s a connection between these shows and the movies, it’s that they’re all produced by the same company. Here’s the a brief timeline of how the grand Marvel Cinematic Universe split apart.