5 Reasons We’re Excited for an Agent Carter Series

With the ABC Agent Carter series now official, here’s why we think it can be awesome.

Agent Carter — whose full title is Marvel’s Agent Carter, naturally — is now officially happening, as ABC have ordered the series for the 2014-2015 season.

With rumors now circulating that ABC may give Agent Carter — with a pilot written by Captain American : The Winter Soldier scribes Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely — a straight-to-series order, and possibly use it to fill the primetime void when Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD takes a midseason break, we thought it’s time to really look at what this show could be. And then get all pre-excited about the everything.

Though we already know Peggy Carter’s fate having watched The Winter Soldier, there are still decades of gaps to fill in, and the Agent Carter show would feature Hayley Atwell reprising her role as Peggy and becoming one of the founders of SHIELD - as it’s forged in the ashes of World War II and the defeat of both Hitler and HYDRA. And if all the pieces fell into place, Dominic Cooper will probably play Howard Stark in a recurring role.

Agents of SHIELD seems to be, in the wake of Cap 2, just now finding its groove. Basically, it wasn’t so much the amount of supplemental comic characters they included as it was the more direct connection to the Marvel cinematic universe that helped them up their game. And Agent Carter would be all over that from the start. So let’s look at what could make Agent Carter so badass.

Carter Kicks Keister

Yes, firstly there’s Agent Margaret "Peggy" Carter herself. A dangerous, cunning, capable, and beautiful British officer who we saw hold her own in the first Captain America movie - and then saw knock a few heads together in her own Marvel One-Shot. Atwell would of course be the second actor to turn her Marvel movie role into a TV lead, and much like Agent Coulson having to deal with being back from the dead, Carter would have an uphill climb as one of the founders of SHIELD, during an era when women weren’t thought of as authority figures. So we foresee a lot of bending and/or breaking of the rules in Carter’s direct horizon.

Plus, we just love a woman who can pulverize a gang of thugs on her own. It brings up find memories of Buffy, Sarah Connor, Sydney Bristow, and a bevy of other beloved ass-kickers. Overall, she’s just a cool and unique character, who must balance her calculating manner with her obvious emotions over the loss of Steve Rogers.

Carter. Agent Carter.

The Greatest Generation

While the show won’t be about dark alleyways, tiki room taverns, and gumshoes, the mid-40s film noir era it will take place in (reports say 1946, mid-way through the Peggy Carter One-Shot, and before the complete formation of SHIELD) is still indubitably awesome. Big Band music, cars with giant radiators, phonographs, wooden radios, whiskey sours - it all screams retro-cool. Of course, being set 70 years in the past is also a bit of an obstacle when it comes to network TV. It’s not exactly the way to draw in a broad audience. But we’re not the gatekeepers of ratings here. We just know that it’d be a lot of fun to watch. I mean, it’s certainly fun to play around in if you’re a fan of the Bioshock series.

And given the fact that a TV show would have a smaller budget than a blockbuster movie, there’s actually a good chance we’ll see our fair share of dark alleyways, tiki taverns, and gumshoes. There’ll probably be a lot more leg work and mystery solving, but we’re betting Carter will make for a pretty cool pseudo-detective.
Haley-Atwell-Peggy-Carter-Red-Dress-570x379

"I’m not bad, I’m just drawn that way."

...Two More Will Take Its Place

Given the huge, game-changing events in The Winter Soldier and Agents of SHIELD. we now know that HYDRA wasn’t defeated back when the Red Skull got vacuumed up into the cosmos. And that when the U.S. government decided to put ex-Hydra scientists, including one Arnim Zola, to work for ’Merica, the brainiacs all decided to keep their dream of world domination alive by infiltrating all known SHIELD ranks and covertly co-running the organization.

So HYDRA will have to be a big running (shadowy) theme on the show. But would they also be the main adversary ? That wouldn’t fully make sense since the whole point is that they kept their survival a secret. Still, Zola could certainly be a recurring character, if not a series regular.

"Can we hurry this up ? I have a Hunger Games to get to."

This doesn’t mean that Agent Carter and SHIELD won’t have to occasionally sweep up the remaining HYDRA hold outs. Which could leave room for Marvel baddies like Madame Hydra (if they can use that character in their own way, putting aside the "Viper" who appeared in The Wolverine, naturally), The Taskmaster, Baron Zemo, Grim Reaper, and more. It just all depends on who Marvel decides to keep in the past and who they choose to jump-forward to present-era HYDRA (like Wolfgang von Strucker), since the MCU already has shown its not bound by keeping the characters in the respective eras we first met them in in the comic books.

I’ll get more into Marvel comic characters in a bit, but needless to say, the new reveal of HYDRA sticking itself onto the spine of SHIELD now gives the Agent Carter an undercurrent and framework that it didn’t previously have.

Ice Road Struckers.

Short Cuts

I think we’re learning more and more each year that shorter cable-model seasons work the best in terms of story and character if you want to tell a serialized story. FOX shows like Sleepy Hollow and The Following have bucked the normal 22-episode network TV trend, and even CBS has gotten into the shorter, serialized game with Under the Dome. In fact, many of Agents of SHIELD’s woes could be attributed to the stalling tactics and fatigue that are side effects of a lengthy network season.

It’s now looking likely that Agent Carter will be a shorter-seasoned series, especially if it does wind up filling in the two month gap between SHIELD half-seasons. Cap 2 writer McFeely went on record a month ago about how the hope was for a 13-episode season, or even less. "Our case would be that it would be a limited series and you would wrap up that one bad guy and that one case, and then if you like it we’ll do it again next year and it’s 1947," he said during a press junket for Winter Soldier.

So we could even be looking at eight episodes a year, focusing on one story and one villain. The perfect recipe for a fantastic 40s-era espionage/action series starring a British bombshell.

Daydreaming about defeating evil.

Golden Years

Having already written about HYDRA, while also writing them off as the main (visible) villains, let’s talk about all the golden age comic characters who could appear on the show. Obviously, some choices have already been made about who to lift up out of the 40s and turn strictly modern (Nick Fury, Eric Koenig, Von Strucker, AIM), but that still leaves a ton of people from the past to play around with. First off, the Howling Commandos are still up for grabs, with Neal McDonough’s Dum Dum Dugan even having appeared in the Agent Carter One-Shot. But could we see, say, James Montgomery Falsworth, who we met in Captain America : The First Avenger, become his comic book alter ego, Union Jack ?

"Get me a cool costume ! Something flag-related !"

Other characters from the era (or close to the era) who could potentially pop in are Jimmy Woo and the Agents of Atlas or any of The Invaders, along with many other Golden Age Marvel players.

And I’ll say this for AIM too. Even though Iron Man 3 made them Aldrich Killian’s think tank, there’s still plenty of HYDRA-related history they could use - figuring out a way to connect the dots between the past comic book version and the new Extremis version. Agents of SHIELD has already shown a connection between The Clairvoyant’s Centipede project and AIM.’s Extremis virus. They’d just have to establish that there’s been a longer-standing relationship between the two. And that AIM possibly predates Killian. Because a ton of people predicted that The Clairvoyant would turn out to be MODOK. And while that wasn’t the case, there’s no use in wasting AIM members or AIM-related stories from yesteryear. And if they didn’t want to totally confuse matters on Agent Carter, they wouldn’t have to necessarily used the title "AIM" They could actually go by their original name "THEM"

It’s time to kick THEM in the arse !

Source : IGN UK du 17/04/14 par Matt Fowler



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A propos de Hayley Atwell, actrice britannique
Hayley Atwell, née le 5 avril 1982 à Londres, Angleterre, est une actrice britannique. Après plusieurs téléfilms, elle obtient son premier rôle au cinéma dans Le Rêve de Cassandre de Woody Allen aux côtés d’Ewan McGregor et Colin Farrell. En 2008, elle apparait dans The Duchess avec Keira Knightley. En (...)
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