Agents of SHIELD – Your frown will be on the record

Agents of SHIELD did pretty damn well in its premiere last week. ABC touted its 12.12 million viewers as the best primetime drama premiere since V’s 2009 bow (However, I seem to remember Elementary doing quite well last year, and so does that show’s Wikipedia page). Regardless, any new pilot’s second episode is going to be a much more accurate picture of what the show is going to be. Tonight’s ratings will be equally important; how many people like what they saw and came back for more?

Update: The Fast Overnights are in: SHIELD 8.4 million viewers, down 30% from last week’s 11.9 (both numbers unadjusted). It also lost 26% of its 4.6 share, falling to 3.4. Last year, the only show ABC picked up for its second season, Nashville, lost 25% of its overall viewership from week one to week two.

SHIELD’s short-term success is truly going to come down to one thing: What do audiences expect when they tune in? There was a growing concern this summer, as ABC used imagery from The Avengers to market the show, that much of the audience was going to be expecting last summer’s Hollywood blockbuster on their flat screens each week. I originally discounted that concern, but there has been more backlash on this point than I expected. Despite the fact that The Avengers took nearly two full years of work to produce, many people tuned in with something like that in mind. ABC and Marvel may have set the bar a little too high.

The marketing got in the way of everything the show’s creative team has been saying from day one. Joss Whedon has compared SHIELD to the Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode “The Zeppo,” which followed Xander on his own adventure, concurrent with a mission that Buffy and the more powerful Scoobies were fulfilling. While being connected to it, SHIELD is mostly going to stand alone from the movies – Sam Jackson’s cameo tonight notwithstanding. For it to be successful, it’s going to have to … but only if audiences don’t skip town before realizing what the show is can be really great.

Making matters more difficult: that the show’s not great already. All of the right ingredients are there, but we’re not cooking with fire just yet. “0-8-4” focused on following Coulson’s team as it worked through growing pains. Considering the makeup, it is no great surprise that this level of conflict would exist. But I think that this arc is speeding along faster than it should – and that is saying something for the second episode. For example, Skye and Grant Ward found common ground despite their competing worldviews much too quickly (if not for the episode’s final moment, confirming that Skye’s ties to Rising Tide were still very much alive, I would say her personal assimilation into the team was also quite speedy).

It is obvious that we are working towards these six individuals becoming the makeshift family that is the touchstone of most of Whedon’s work. But the familiarity with his previous work could become a negative. If Firefly was about solving crimes in a world with superheroes, it would be called Agents of SHIELD. I scoffed at the similarities between Coulson’s “Bus” and Serenity last week, but “0-8-4”’s deeper exploration of the plane makes them harder to ignore. Much more important, though, are the similarities between the crew. There’s no 1-to-1 analogy between the individual characters, but the soul of one is readily apparent in the other.

Don’t get me wrong: despite these concerns, SHIELD is one of the two shows I am already hooked on at this early point of the new year (NBC’s The Blacklist being the other). I am a fan of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, I am a fan of everything Mutant Enemy and I have been a fan of Clark Gregg ever since he asked “Quo Vadimus.” I am not going anywhere, and I hope other viewers feel the same way. Joss may not being running Agents of SHIELD day-to-day, but the show very obviously has his stamp on it. It’s a little rough around the edges now, but most new shows start similarly. It may not be yet, but SHIELD is going to be something special.

Notes & Quotes

• “And technically, Skye’s a member of the Rising Tide. She hacked our RSA implementation.” – Ward
  “Twice. On a laptop. Imagine what she she’ll do with our resources.” – Coulson
  “I am. That’s exactly what I’m imagining during this frown.” – Ward
• OK … we’re now on the third “Tahiti/It’s a magical place” bit. Maybe those theories that Tahiti really is a magical place aren’t that far off the mark – or it is to be a big red herring.
• “Usually, one person doesn’t have the solution. But 100 people? With 1% of the solution? That will get it done.” – Skye
• To that guy I got into an argument on reddit a couple of weeks ago about the likelihood of Sam Jackson showing up, I concede, random-internet-guy, your rightness and my wrongness. Bastard.
• In certain circles, there has been a bit of a discussion on whether or not the show and organization should be referred to as SHIELD or S.H.I.E.L.D. For a couple of reasons, most of which don’t really matter to most folks, we are going with the former.