I previously said that Agatha All Along was probably going to be the least-watched Marvel series overall, no matter its quality, given its lack of focus on bigger MCU names. Well, the show is high quality, and while we do not have full data to see where it ultimately ranks in terms of viewership, it’s…going up, significantly, over time.
All the way into episode 7, which aired this past Wednesday, we know that it got 4.2 million viewers globally in just one day of viewership, which puts it a full 35% above its premiere numbers, where for many shows that might be its peak, and it often trails off the longer a season goes. A measure of success in the streaming era is how many people finish a season they start, and when viewership goes up this late in the game, that’s an amazing sign. Incidentally, this exact same thing is happening with the also-excellent-but-polar-opposite The Penguin on HBO right now.
I do wonder if word of mouth may have spread fast about episode 7 in particular that it was the best episode of the show so far and a must-watch as soon as possible. And it was in fact the show’s best episode so far, an “out of time” storyline featuring a winding chronology focused on Patti LuPone Lillia. The episode currently has a 9.2/10 on IMDB, the series’ highest, and I think it can be considered one of the best episodes of any MCU series so far, and Agatha is certainly one of the best shows on the whole. If not the best.
None of this matters for getting Disney to renew the show for season 2. Like many of its other series, Agatha All Along was always meant to be a miniseries with a hard stop, and the way the show is structured, it supposedly has a definitive ending, and was always meant to. This is not to say we won’t see these characters elsewhere. VisionQuest is continuing this sub-story in the MCU, and there are rumors about a Tommy Maximoff series after this, perhaps. Agatha, if she survives, could appear in other projects. But this show is done after this, similar to again, The Penguin, another comic book one-off miniseries where despite its viewership and critical praise, will not return.
Agatha All Along is a big success in a nearly empty MCU year. No, it’s not putting up a billion dollars at the box office like Deadpool and Wolverine, but it’s a hit all the same, and maybe, just maybe those who made it (Jac Schaeffer!) should have a much larger role in shaping the MCU going forward…
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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.
