Nevertheless, I liked WandaVision. Through the first three episodes, the Marvel mythology recedes even as it provides enough stakes and structure to keep the old-timey sitcom riffs from having to shoulder the series. Over the years there have been all sorts of attempts to bring back the laugh-track sitcom, but WandaVision is more successful than most of them (I know, knock me over with a feather) because it’s all icing on the cake—the cake actually being the grim and complex Marvel mythology and backstory. Even as many of the show’s details are doing double duty as hints and feints—Kathryn Hahn’s nosy neighbor isn’t just a brash character cracking endless jokes at her husband’s expense, she’s probably someone else; the commercials that talk so much about being in and out of time are presumably hinting at some big themes—but it’s more interested in the sitcom as a sitcom than it has to be. Its sendup of the way sitcoms have historically hidden real pregnancies or the way they characterize Black neighbors are observations unto themselves, and just not there to further the master plot.

he first two episodes of WandaVision, which arrive tomorrow on Disney Plus (the remaining seven will follow weekly), riff on the black and white classics The Dick Van Dyke Show and Bewitched with affection and precision. The gags are tame, corny, and adorable. Vision carries Wanda over the threshold, but after accidentally apparating through the front door, he leaves her on the threshold. That silly Vision! Housewife Wanda accidentally breaks a flying dish over her hubby’s head. Handy Wanda can zap it back together! In the episode’s set piece, Wanda and Vision forget Vision’s boss is coming to dinner (I can just picture the description in TV Guide) revealing that they have forgotten much else besides, including how they met, how they got there, and who they are. But these hints about what’s really going on don’t keep the episode from working on sitcom terms. The sequence climaxes with the boss’s wife (That ’70s Show veteran Debra Jo Rupp) opening the galley kitchen shutters to reveal Wanda whizzing dozens of pots, pans, and ingredients through the air. When a flustered Vision distracts her by belting out “Yakety Yak,” I giggled along with the laugh track, a chuckle earned by the pure sitcommery.

TV, the cliché goes, is an escape, a trapdoor to a sunnier reality—or at least a different one. For us mere mortals, the escape is always metaphorical; our earthbound bodies don’t budge from the couch

WandaVision Is a Marvel Show for People Who Don’t Like Marvel

In this regard, fandom is not extreme: the current moment is extreme. And fandom is as much part of the solution as it is part of the problem.”

And fandom is as much part of the solution as it is part of the problem

But such a fan-guided approach to art also feels endemic of a time when a lot of mainstream storytelling has come to be regarded more as a product designed to service the consumer than a means of artistic expression.

On the more extreme end of the spectrum, they even rely on them as investors. A famous example being the 2014 big-screen revival of cult TV detective drama Veronica Mars, a sequel made possible only by the crowdfunding efforts of fans, and which subsequently led to a 2019 TV return on streaming service Hulu.

“Fans engaging actively with the materials of their culture has improved our world in countless ways,” says Jenkins. “Television as it exists today is largely a response to modes of engagement that fans have modelled over the past several decades – [

Yet the extent to which the internet has changed the very nature of fandom is debatable. According to leading media scholar Henry Jenkins, whose 1992 book Textual Poachers is considered the founding text of fan studies, it has merely “increased the scope and scale of the fan community, allowed for ongoing interactions amongst fans, and made the entertainment industry more aware of the kind of fan responses which have been occurring all along”.

“I don’t know quite how I feel about the audience being in on the creation of it while it’s happening,” said Jim Carrey, who plays Sonic’s nemesis Dr Robotnik, when asked about it last year. “I believe in auteurs, and I believe in creatives. I believe in having them do it.

The ability of fans to shape and change the art they enjoy is nothing new. In 1893, the reaction to Arthur Conan Doyle killing off Sherlock Holmes was so intense that he eventually resurrected him ten years later.

The redesign of the new big-screen Sonic, in response to a fan backlash, shows how people power is now shaping pop culture – but what does that mean for creativity, asks Stephen Kelly.

But now we have more shows, so we’re still recapping a lot — it’s just that there’s so many more.

It’s not that people have stopped paying attention to TV; it’s that they’re no longer paying attention to the same TV, which means there’s less of an imperative to understand and discuss a given episode.

hereThere are many reasons why a recap series begun in the 2010s is unlikely to attain the popularity of some of the biggest recap series from the aughts.

Married bloggers Tom Fitzgerald and Lorenzo Marquez have been commenting on pop culture and fashion at their namesake site for more than a decade.

It was a place for like-minded souls to congregate

It wasn’t until late in the show’s second season, however, that Jensen started to share his theorizing for public consumption, first as a column dedicated to speculation and then as a recap that combined a functional synopsis with Jensen’s signature style,

A third epicenter of what came to be known as “recap culture” — the diverse ecosystem of writers and commenters that flourished across a constellation of sites — arose in 2007, when Chicago-based site The A.V. Club, an offshoot of The Onion focused on arts and culture, started running its own series of recaps collectively branded TV Club.

A few years into the existence of Television Without Pity, Sepinwall launched a recap site of his own, with a single author but similarly expansive ambitions.

nIn 1998, writers Tara Ariano and Sarah D. Bunting launched a fan site for WB teen drama Dawson’s Creek, titled Dawson’s Wrap, in partnership with tech master David T. Cole; by 2002, they had widened their focus to nearly three dozen shows, from Survivor to The Sopranos, under the name Television Without Pity.

What I was seeing online was that there were a number of fans out there that were building these websites that were devoted to these amazing theories,”

mid-1990s

Alan Sepinwall