For months, Netflix has been a wasteland, mostly a lot of "dead girl in a small town" cop shows and "poor boy and rich girl fall in love" Korean melodramas. So we have pulled the plug and switched to Disney Plus, which allows us to finally see what all the fuss is about with Wandavision.
The series has been showing up on my Twitter and Facebook feeds a lot: "The staggering surprise of the last episode!": "Wasn't the last episode the best thing you ever saw?"; "Fifteen top theories about the new Disney Plus hit!" But what was it? I figured the video blog of Wanda from Corner Gas.
I started watching with only minimal research, enouth to determine that Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olson) and Vision (Paul Bettany) are superheroes in the Marvel Universe who are dating or married to each other. So, if she was dating The Incredible Hulk, would the show be called Wandahulk?
In the first two episodes, they seem to be the stars of an archetypal early 1960s black-and-white sitcom with a "my secret identity" premise: Vision is a robot, and Wanda has magical powers. Plotlines are about what you'd expect from old sitcoms, although you'll have to grow up with them to get all the references.
Episode #1: The living room is from The Dick Van Dyke Show, and the kitchen from I Love Lucy. Vision has a job at an amorphous company that doesn't produce or sell anything, like sitcom dads of the era. There's a wacky next door neighbor. The plot: Wanda thinks that the "special night" is their anniversary, but it's actually dinner with the boss and his wife.
Episode #2: The living-dining room, front yard, and opening credits are from Bewitched. The plot: Wanda and Vision are set to perform at a talent show to benefit the local elementary school, but Vision is incapacitated by eating chewing gum (apparently he can't eat, although, as Isaac Asimov pointed out in I, Robot, food is a part of so many social occasions that any robot designed to interact with humans should have the capability).
Of course, Wandavision is not a complete clone of these shows. The friends and neighbors are racially diverse without comment; for instance, Vision's coworker Norm is played by Asif Ali (below), and future episodes will feature Special Agent Jimmy Woo (Randall Park, left). There were no black or Asian characters on early 1960s sitcoms, except for a very few episodes about them.
There also seem to be more jokes about sex than appeared in the uptight sixties.
And there are occasional hints that something is wrong.
1. Wanda and Vision don't want to say where they came from, how long they've lived in Westview, or how long they've been married. It's unclear if they actually don't know. Maybe they can't remember anything before the "series" began, like the residents of Storywood in Once Upon a Time.
2. At dinner, the boss starts choking on a piece of food, and his wife laughs and tells him to "Stop it" over and over. An inappropriate affect.
3. People keep announcing that the talent show is a benefit "for the children," and everyone repeats "for the children" in a robotic drone.
4. In the second episode, red objects occasionally appear in the black-and-white world, and then suddenly everything switches to color.
5. Wanda asks a new acquaintance her name, and she doesn't know.
I would prefer more hints. Most of each episode's dialogue, characterization, and plot so closely matches early 1960s sitcoms that I wanted to turn it off and watch a real episode of I Love Lucy or Bewitched. I want more evidence this is not actually a 1960s sitcom, it's a science fiction series about superheroes trapped in a sitcom world.
Beefcake: No.
Heterosexism: Wanda and Vision are a standard loving heterosexual couple.
Gay Characters: None specified yet.
Will I Keep Watching: Sure. I want to see their take on The Brady Bunch in the 1970s and the hip sitcoms of the 1980s.