I just finished watching the season finale of Marvel’s Agent Carter.
I normally catch up on my TV shows at night but I just couldn’t help watching Agent Carter as soon as it was available!
Now that the series is finished (still hoping for a Season 2), I find myself asking – How am I going to go back to watching Agents of Shield when Agent Carter is, hands down, so much better?
If you haven’t been watching Agent Carter, you should give it a try. It is much, much better than Agents of Shield.
What is this Agent Carter TV show?
Peggy Carter was Steve Rogers, a.k.a. Captain America’s, love interest in the Captain America movies. It follows her story after Captain America was lost at the end of World War II. The show is set in 1946.
Agent Carter was conceptualized as a short series to keep Agents of Shield fans from becoming bored while AoS is on break. Because the show was only supposed to go for 8 episodes, this allowed the writers to develop a story that would only span 8 episodes and tie everything up neatly by then. This makes the series short and sweet – no dragging, no “filler” episodes. Every episode, every shot, has a purpose in moving the story forward towards its conclusion in the last episode.
Why I Like Agent Carter
When I watched the first few episodes of Agent Carter, I admit, I was skeptical. Watching Peggy Carter fetch coffee and order lunch was, well, boring, and her extracurricular activities were mostly skulking about and hiding from her male colleagues, and it just didn’t grab my interest.
But I like the actor who plays Jarvis (Stark’s butler), so I continued to watch the show. By the fifth episode, it had gotten exciting – Peggy was kicking ass! And a lot of it was good old-fashioned fistfights with some street-smart fighting thrown in.
I also like that they didn’t make Peggy out to be some stick-thin woman. Peggy is a normal-sized woman and she looks believable when throwing punches and knocking out bad people.
They also had better actors here than in Agents of Shield. The actors in Agent Carter just had more gravitas – in Tagalog, mas mabigat ang dating. Just more serious in their craft. Sometimes watching Agents of Shield felt like watching some college kids trying to be S.H.I.E.L.D. agents. I really, really hate Agent Ward from Agents of Shield. When he turned out to be a bad guy, I was like, I knew it, you duplicitous S.O.B.! I really wished they had killed him off after the whole Hydra thing.
Some actors in Agent Carter you might recognize from other shows: James D’Arcy (Revelation, his name always reminds me of Pride & Prejudice), Chad Michael Murray (One Tree Hill), Bridget Regan (Kahlan in Legend of the Seeker; Rebecca, White Collar; and I think she looked better with her Kahlan weight, I think she’s too thin now).
Even though some of the characters can be jerks, I find myself liking them and caring about them – which is more than I can say for the Agents of Shield characters, even after watching them for 2 seasons I couldn’t care less if they died, except Ward because I hate him, and I’d be happy if he died.
And like I already mentioned above, Agent Carter’s story is tight and compact. The first few episodes were setting up the story, you know where the story is going, and you know there’s going to be a conclusion. In comparison, Agents of Shield’s storyline was all over the place.
Call Me Old-Fashioned
Despite the attitude that women don’t make good agents prevalent during that era, I really like the old-fashioned feel of the show.
There was no nudity, everybody was well-dressed, and there were just some things you didn’t speak about openly – for example, when referring to Howard Stark’s playboy ways, they talk about the women that Mr. Stark has “entertained”, instead of the modern “slept with”.
There were no portrayals of people sleeping with each other – which is a welcome relief from all the nudity and graphic portrayals from shows like Game of Thrones, House of Cards, True Blood. Men are “gentlemen” and turn away when they see a woman in a state of undress. It’s a show that I can wholeheartedly recommend to relatives and friends, and even watch together with them, without feeling any discomfort about any unsavory scenes.
There is only one other recent TV show where I can say that – and that’s Noah Wyle’s The Librarians.
I may not have been alive during the 40’s and 50’s, but I do like the lack of indecency that Agent Carter has. It’s just so rare now that almost every other show is trying to push the envelope and be hip by showing gratuitous sex and violence, adultery, LGBT issues, race issues, broken families, etc… I watch TV shows for the good story, good action, good detective work, likable characters – I definitely don’t watch it for the “issues”, and nudity and graphic sex scenes just makes it very uncomfortable when I’m watching the show with other people. This has me feeling a bit of nostalgia for the “good old days”, and hoping for an improvement in our current shows. Why can’t we have more shows like this – telling a good adventure story while promoting decency instead of glamorizing moral decay?
