WandaVision is the show that best encapsulates the pandemic

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https://www.gq.com/story/wandavision...st-pandemic-tv

"Entertainment is, among other things, an escape. An absorbing story, enriching world and compelling characters can help us forget our problems and fears for a brief time," says Carrie Wittmer. "In Disney+’s Marvel Cinematic Universe spin-off WandaVision, Wanda Maximoff—the ex-Avenger with the power to influence behavior and reality—has made television, quite literally, her life in order to escape from her grief over losing her great love, the synthetic android Vision. She stole Vision’s corpse from a government facility so she could live a perfect life with him in Westview, the New Jersey town she’s holding captive mentally and physically. In doing so, Wanda has essentially been comfort bingeing — though instead of endlessly watching television, she’s embodying it by literally forcing an entire town to enact homages to different sitcom eras in each episode. This began with the 50s and advances a decade with each installment, and as the sitcoms Wanda is satirizing get closer to the present day, she’s unraveling more rapidly...WandaVision was conceived and put into production long before the pandemic, but it’s hard not to see similarities to the ways we’ve been using entertainment to disassociate, now more than ever. I may not have the power to create an alternate reality, but every period of my life is synonymous with a defining TV show or movie. (The OC is my teens, Mad Men my early twenties, and currently I am going through what can only be described as a 'horny for Robert Redford period.') Like the Marvel Cinematic Universe, my entertainment habits go through phases. During the pandemic, these phases have accelerated from years into months, or mere weeks."

ALSO:

• WandaVision cinematographer Jess Hall used 47 different lenses to re-create seven different sitcom eras: Hall says he tried to channel David Lynch and went through a lot of literature and classic sitcom viewing to carefully craft lighting style, composition and camera movement for the Marvel series. "It started with looking at literature about the history of sitcoms and then I went into watching a lot of sitcoms: what were the filmmaking techniques, what was the filmmaking vocabulary of the era across different sitcoms from each area?" he says. "I was trying to figure out what tools filmmakers had at their disposal which influenced the decisions they made in terms of lighting techniques, which film stocks were available, what kind of camera platforms they were using, etcetera." Hall adds: "I’ve always been a huge Lynch fan, and Lynch combined with The Twilight Zone was sort of the feeling that I wanted to get with the unease that was created when this sort of Pleasantville bubble of sitcom discomfort was disrupted. It was Lynchian, it was dark, it was disconcerting and a little bit more cinematic. I looked at a lot of The Twilight Zone as well. I enjoyed the tone they struck in earlier episodes."
• Hall on using different aspect ratios on WandaVision: "I mean, I think ultimately, everyone had their opinion, but I think the final permission came from the top — as filmmakers we all have desires, but we all work for somebody," says Hall. "Ultimately, the decision from the studio came that they were comfortable with it, and that was great because it was a real commitment on their behalf to the vision and integrity of the show, I think. And it was a bold choice, I mean, there were arguments that audiences don't like 4:3, but I think this has proved that if the content is good enough, audiences will accept 4:3 and they'll accept black and white."
• How the "Agatha All Along" sequence was filmed
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• "Agatha All Along" is the new "Werewolf Bar Mitzvah"
• "Agatha All Along" is inspiring lots of remixes and memes

WandaVision has turned what could have been a one-joke spoof of sitcom nostalgia into something both chilling and relatable

"In early 2021, a streaming series about television as both escape and prison is practically a documentary," says James Poniewozik. "WandaVision, a pleasantly weird ornament on the narrative megalith of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, is TV’s latest diversion from the pandemic and perhaps its best metaphor. It is also a meta feast for pop culture scrutinizers, a mash-up of two American mass-culture mythologies. It smushes the chocolate of superherodom into the peanut butter of feel-good sitcoms, making for two great empty-calorie tastes that, together, add up to a balanced meal....The early read on WandaVision was 'sitcom parody.' It’s not very groundbreaking as that, since spoofs of sitcom clichés — on Saturday Night Live, In Living Color, Mad TV — have been around so long that they’re clichés in themselves. (The Brady Bunch alone, the target of the third episode, went through its own self-ironizing cycles, complete with a parody movie, a solid generation ago.) Fortunately, WandaVision is more than parody. It excels first as bittersweet romance and second as horror, playing off our dual relationship with family sitcoms: that we return to them as a place of familiarity and comfort, even as we know that they’re uncanny and false. Technically, the mimicry is astonishing, from the swanky midcentury set design to the comic-misunderstanding subplots to the period-appropriate fake ads. ('Forget the past — this is your future!' promises a toaster ad in the first episode, a bit of Space Age pitchmanship that also hints at the amnesiac nature of Wanda’s reality.) The tiniest details are there, like the handheld-camera push-ins on the handheld-camera comedies of the aughts. In a few quick strokes, WandaVision is a remarkably compact tour of sitcom history: black-and-white to color, multi- to single-cam, sincerity to special episodes to snark. I could quibble here and there. (If you think of Malcolm in the Middle as just an anarchic kids’ romp, you’re forgetting it was one of TV’s better sitcoms about living paycheck-to-paycheck.) But the whole suggests that the creative team’s childhood hours in front of the tube were gainfully wasted."

ALSO:

• Robert Lopez and Kristen Anderson-Lopez react to their "Agatha All Along" song becoming a hit: "None of us knew this was going to be the song,” said Robert Lopez. Kristen Anderson-Lopez adds. “We woke up that morning to find that it was all over the internet, and it was like, ‘This is awesome.’” It isn’t the first time the songwriting power couple -- and EGOT winners -- has created an infectious ear worm, having written tunes like the Oscar- and Grammy-winning song "Let It Go” for the Disney animated movie Frozen and the Oscar-winning ballad “Remember Me” for the Pixar animated film Coco.
• Elizabeth Olsen already explained what’s going on in WandaVision five years ago, in an Allure interview
• Check out an appreciation of Kathryn Hahn's amazing WandaVision faces
• Presenting 10 WandaVision gifts

Randall Park's The Office cameo is no longer his most famous role, thanks to WandaVision making him a Gen Z TikTok obsession

The former Fresh Off the Boat star's most memorable role was his cameo as "Asian Jim" on The Office. "That changed this year, when Park appeared as Agent Jimmy Woo in Marvel Studios’ newest Disney+ TV series, WandaVision," Hannah Docter-Loeb. "Although Park’s character had featured in the earlier MCU film Ant-Man and the Wasp, this time Woo seems to have a much bigger role and plenty of tricks up his sleeve—literally. Park’s portrayal of Woo in WandaVision has garnered him a growing fanbase—Google searches for his name, according to Google Trends 1-100 scale for search interest, went from 8 in January to 100 by Valentine’s Day. Fans have swooned over his heroism, clever one-liners, and general charisma. The Woo worship has even inspired the idea for a spin-off TV show all about Woo, with one director even pitching the idea of an X-Files-style series to Marvel honcho Kevin Feige. Many have taken to Twitter and TikTok to express their love and appreciation for the character, even hijacking the #woobackwednesday hashtag which had previously been used to honor the late rapper Pop Smoke. In the midst of all this Jimmy Woo infatuation, a new phenomenon has begun. Fans are starting to realize just how omnipresent Randall Park is. In fact, Park’s pervasiveness has spurred a new TikTok trend, in which users will film themselves watching the beginning of a video clip. Be it a movie, TV show, or even a UCLA graduation ceremony, the user will then highlight the fact that Park—or rather 'Jimmy Woo'—makes an appearance and is the real star of the show with a startling music cue and a 'SIKE!' The trend’s accompanying sound has been used in over 8,000 videos, and the hashtag that is often in the caption (#jimmywoo) has amassed over 90 million views as of Feb. 19. It only takes a few of these videos—which have been crowding up countless 'for you' pages, including my own—to get the gist."