Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. finale marks the end of an era when Marvel shows could run free

Slate

"After seven seasons and 134 episodes, Agents of SHIELD comes to an end on ABC this week, and with it might go the last of the great Marvel TV shows," says Amanda Prahl. "As Disney has moved to consolidate all of its properties under the same banner, it’s systematically extinguished the TV shows licensed to non-Disney outlets—Netflix’s Defenders quartet, FX’s Legion, Hulu’s Runaways—to make room for a new batch exclusive to Disney+, featuring actors and characters ported over from the movies, and even those on Disney-owned networkers like Freeform and ABC are getting the hook in favor of moving everything to Disney’s subscription streaming service. Agents of SHIELD isn’t quite the last of the pre-Disney+ Marvel shows (Hellstrom, a one-off limited series, will air on Hulu in October), but it already feels like a relic of an era in which those properties could develop along their own lines without needing to serve as trailers for future blockbusters. Agents of SHIELD was more closely tied to the movies than most—Clark Gregg’s Agent Coulson, for one, made several jumps from the TV to the big screen—but as the series extricated itself from the larger continuity, it got a kind of freedom the rest of the universe couldn’t—and now, probably, never will." Prahl adds: "With the new wave of Disney+ shows united under MCU mastermind Kevin Feige, I fear that self-contained quality may be on the verge of extinction. Where Marvel TV shows used to be allowed their own discrete tones and storytelling, the very nature of the new wave means those series must serve the movies first and themselves second. And, unfortunately, that also may mean less thematic freedom."