Agent Carter deserves a Disney+ revival from Marvel Studios

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https://www.flixist.com/agent-carter...s-224243.phtml

Specifics on the post-Avengers: Endgame Marvel Cinematic Universe plans are a bit hazy, but Marvel Studios is planning to get a lot of mileage from some of their older characters. Enter Disney+, the streaming service which will be the home of shows like WandaVision and The Falcon and the Winter Soldier that are in the works. But the concept of creating shorter miniseries based on supporting MCU characters should already sound familiar—Marvel Television did this with Agent Carter, which starred Hayley Atwell. Untimely canceled by ABC, perhaps it's time to toss Peggy Carter back in the ring and honor the show that made these other projects viable in the first place.

There isn't anything indicating that an Agent Carter revival will happen any time soon, but it absolutely should. Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. does indeed deserve credit for being the first television spin-off of its kind -- and not only had some fun Agent Carter tie-ins in its second season but also remains a damn good show on its own -- but long story short, Carter was the first of these spin-offs to focus on one single character, and it remains the only Marvel Television joint that Marvel Studios really cared about. Not only were the right people involved in making the original ABC show to potentially spark interest in a new third season, but Agent Carter was just a damn good show that left us too soon.

While there has always been a disconnect between Marvel Studios, the studio behind the theatrical films and the upcoming Disney+ shows, and Marvel Television, the branch that produces Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and the other shows on Netflix, Hulu, Freeform, and ABC, Agent Carter is unique for being in a space between both entities. Unlike the other shows, Agent Carter is the only program with Marvel Studios figureheads Kevin Feige and Louis D'Esposito having any credited involvement.

It all goes back to the Marvel One-Shot short film, also named Agent Carter, which came with the Iron Man 3 home release. That short was directed by D'Esposito and written by Eric Pearson, who went on to write several episodes for the show and co-wrote Thor: Ragnarok. It served as a proof of concept: Hayley Atwell's Margaret "Peggy" Carter, in a post-war world, navigates through a sexist workplace at the Strategic Science Reserve (the precursor to S.H.I.E.L.D.) while moonlighting as an agent and doing the hard work singlehandedly.

That premise eventually became the base of the television show, which not only had Feige, D'Esposito (who directed the pilot), and Pearson involved, but Christopher Markus & Stephen McFeely as the credited creators of the show—the pair not only wrote the three Captain America films, but Avengers: Infinity War and Endgame, in case you've ever heard of any of those movies. Needless to say, those are all people who have quite a lot of pull within Marvel and Disney—if they somehow didn't then, they certainly do now after the latest box office returns.

What I'm getting at here is that these are all people who very much love Peggy Carter, and are heavily invested in this small corner of the MCU that they created. Need any more proof? Well, there was that one essential cameo in Avengers: Endgame. If you are somehow part of the small portion of humanity that didn't contribute to the $1 billion-plus weekend gross, minor spoilers are ahead.

Not only does Peggy Carter make an appearance through time traveling hi-jinx, but Markus and McFeely made MCU history by inserting the first instance of a character introduced on a Marvel Television show into a Marvel Studios film. Not Quake from S.H.I.E.L.D., not Daredevil or any of those Netflix schmucks, and certainly not any of the Inhumans—but Edwin Jarvis, as played by James D'Arcy from the television show. While he only had a grand total of one line of dialogue in Endgame, I straight up squealed in the theater when he popped up to pick up Howard Stark.

And to me, that squeal was well-earned over two seasons of good television—Jarvis, the namesake of Tony Stark's Paul Bettany-voiced AI, was just a part of one of my favorite portions of the overall MCU. Edwin Jarvis, Dottie Underwood, Daniel Sousa—these are names that probably mean nothing to the casual MCU fan, but all were wonderful contributions to the world.

First, there's Peggy Carter herself. It's worth mentioning that Atwell taking a lead role made her a real trailblazer for the MCU. We often credit Captain Marvel for having the first Marvel female lead, but before that was Ant-Man and the Wasp with a lead female title role; before that was Jessica Jones on Netflix for the first solo female super-powered lead, and even before that was Agent Carter. Continuing the short film's depiction of a sexist work environment, Peggy Carter, unfortunately, had to put in more work to prove herself to her male colleagues, which resulted in numerous memorable sequences.