Marvel is releasing art for each episode going forward, this is the first, it’s pretty great!

Just a quick post here… Why aren’t people watching this show? Ok, I know why, it started really slow and a bit dry… But so did Start Trek: TNG.

Ok, I get it times have changed and there’s a lot of good shows out there. Why waste time on a slow moving show. I get it, I do… But, Marvel is doing something very interesting. They are taking their cinematic universe and tying a TV show in with it, in real time. It’s a big risk, because it could really blow up in their faces. Some could say that Captain America was basically an episode of Shield, just with some of the side characters being used more prominently. Or, people could say that they don’t want to watch the next episode until they have a chance to watch the movie, and some people just aren’t going to see the movie in the theater.

This makes for a few problems. One is that the rating for the episode right after a movie could slide, simply because people don’t want to spoil the movie… But that could mean a ratings burst for one episode later. I’m kind hoping that happens next week. That people will have watched the episode via Hulu, iTunes or whatever after having seen the movie and will be excited to watch the next episode ASAP. Time will tell.

The other problem is that they have to do some kind of info dump in any episode following a movie to let people who haven’t watched the movie know what’s going on, while also trying to not give away spoilers. I don’t know how successful they were in this episode with that. Yes, I do think it flowed pretty well from the last episode and it was fairly clear what was going on. But I think if I hadn’t seen the movie, I’d be wondering why they were suddenly talking about that “other agency” so much. They also kind of give away the end of the movie at the end of the episode. But it’s almost a throwaway line so, unless you know what they are talking about, you might not get it. All in all, I think they did OK here.

Alright, Let’s talk about the big spoiler here. I’ll put it “below the fold” if you don’t want to read it… Read more ›