Jed Whedon and Maurissa Tancharoen spoke exclusively with BuzzFeed about the highs and lows of Season 1, the finale’s ramifications on Season 2, and the one thing they’ll never do again.
ABC
It's hard to remember a TV show that had higher pre-premiere expectations than Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., Marvel Studios' first foray into episodic television on ABC. Designed to present (slightly more) grounded stories, no one knew quite what to expect from the weekly series, executive produced by Jed Whedon (brother of Joss) and his wife, Maurissa Tancharoen.
The duo certainly boasted the right geek cred (Dollhouse, Spartacus: Gods of the Arena, The Avengers), but many questioned why Marvel would hand over the reigns to one of their most important endeavors to first-time showrunners. The Joss Whedon-directed pilot, with a script penned by all three, did an excellent job of welcoming new viewers to The Avengers universe, while also introducing new agents: company man Grant Ward (Brett Dalton), butt-kicking Melinda May (Ming-Na Wen), hacktivist Skye (Chloe Bennet), and technogeeks Jemma Simmons (Elizabeth Henstridge ) and Leo Fitz (Iain De Caestecker).
But the celebration was short-lived as the early episodes were tasked with an unenviable amount of heavy lifting: cementing the core dynamics of this freshly formed team, fleshing out five new characters, producing an engaging procedural that's visually and conceptually worthy of the Marvel brand, explaining how Agent Coulson (Clark Gregg) was resurrected after dying in The Avengers, and contributing to the ongoing stories of the cinematic Marvel universe.
While many episodes excelled at this balancing act (February's "T.R.A.C.K.S.," in which Skye is shot and nearly dies, is a near-perfect hour of television), the weight of all that responsibility often crushed the series. All freshman shows experience growing pains, but Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.'s built-in audience awareness served as a doubled-edged sword, driving a blade deeper into every fracture.
Then came Captain America: The Winter Soldier, the blockbuster film that — SPOILER ALERT — destroyed S.H.I.E.L.D., sending a shockwave through the series. It's only in retrospect that one realizes the true degree of difficulty that Whedon, Tancharoen, and their team have faced, since they were secretly building to this seismic shift all along.
The S.H.I.E.L.D.–HYDRA twist reinvigorated the show and revealed that a myriad of subplots — Ward's relationships with Skye and May, Coulson's resurrection, the repeated efforts of Ian Quinn (David Conrad) to become a super-villain — were secretly designed, all along, to culminate in this moment.
In many ways, Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. was itself a sleeper agent, making you believe it was a rote procedural with only the most tangential relationship to the mother ship, when in reality, it was a cooly calculated extension of every Marvel outing to date. In short, the show's first season is a 22-hour movie, one that has left its creators elated — and exhausted.
Before taking a well-deserved vacation, Jed Whedon and Maurissa Tancharoen spoke exclusively with BuzzFeed about the high and low points of Season 1, how S.H.I.E.L.D.'s May 13 season finale sets up Season 2, and why they will absolutely never read internet comments again.
Ed.: This interview was conducted on May 7, before ABC renewed Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. for a second season.
ABC
Let's go back to when ABC picked up the show. What was your trick to handling the inherent pressure that comes along with creating Marvel's first TV series?
Jed Whedon: We sort of ignored it. It's not an option to feel the pressure because if we went in trying to tell stories with all that in mind, we wouldn't sleep at night and wouldn't be able to come up with anything because our decisions would have been based on fear, as opposed to figuring out how to lay the groundwork for what we wanted the show to be, and trying to tell stories we would want to watch.
Maurissa Tancharoen: If we thought about that we'd be rocking in a corner of our own feces. Instead, what we did was just focus on the task at hand and focus on story and focus on the new characters that were never established in the Marvel universe.
At what point were you told that S.H.I.E.L.D., the agency your show was built around, would cease to exist come April 4, when Winter Solder hit theaters?
MT: Basically, the same day we were picked up. We have the privilege of seeing every Marvel script, and knowing what they have in the pipeline, so we knew going in that would be a part of our show and that we had to build toward that.
JW: It's the kind of thing that if someone told you that concept, you'd think it was a great thing to have happen at the beginning of the show or the end of Season 3. To have it happen in the middle of your first season is an interesting kind of riddle because we had to quickly establish what a regular day at S.H.I.E.L.D. looks like, what it is it like to go on a mission, say here's the team, and that there are also different teams all over the world. Then to blow that up, we knew the way to best illustrate that was by putting it on a personal level with our main man Coulson and to put him through the paces as a man dedicated to an organization.
MT: We see what it actually looks like for S.H.I.E.L.D. to crumble in Captain America 2, we see the Helicarriers literally barreling through the Triskelion, we see the massive destruction throughout the city, but the benefit of our show is we get to dive into the emotional toll of that. To build our characters up to a point where they have established a bond, and they are working together in a way they've never worked together before, and to strip away the foundation that they've dedicated their lives to and the trust they've now laid with one another, it's a really fun thing to play.
When did you decide Agent Ward would be a sleeper agent?
JW: When we started conceptualizing the show with Joss, knowing this was coming, we knew there would have to be some sort of personal toll, and there's the version of it where someone gets injured, but since this is an infiltration based on betrayal on a massive scale, we wanted to have it on the small scale, and have it be a really personal dagger to the heart.
MT: We had to be very careful about what was revealed in Cap 2, so any mention of HYDRA was off-limits. We knew that reveal would make a big impact, but we also knew we wanted to make everyone free from any suspicion. We didn't want there to be any stink on any of our characters.
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