I have all but Given Up on Marvel (and Switched to the Flanaganverse)

 I know I'm late to the party, and I know that talking about how the quality of Marvel has gone down is already quite old, but hear me out.

I think a really big part of "why" I can't get into Marvel shows anymore is their insistence on making adaptations of recent successful comics into long-form TV shows, which are essentially 8-hour movies.

#1 - It's really hard to do these new style of TV show. 

Just in general, it's easier to make a movie and it's easier to do a serialized shows where the status quo is more-or-less maintained at the end of each episode. We've seen a lot of things on streaming services lately that are a new breed of media, where it's essentially one long story, focused on one plotline. I recently finished Midnight Mass and I'm one episode away from finishing Hill House, and I think the key to making this work is doing nothing with the plot and focusing on the characters.

I loved both of those Flanaganverse shows, but the key to making them work was just doing a deep dive on the characters while the plot remains completely static for hours. Seriously, what happens in Hill House? Go to the house, leave the house, funeral, go to the house. Midnght Mass is basically a long mystery unfolding. (Which is why I think Wandavision might be the best Marvel show to date.)

With a lot of the Marvel shows, they have an overarching plot, and then several side plots. The overarching plot is generally moving along, and then it's broken up with the side plots, but because the main plot is always moving, it lacks any urgency. And then side plots feel pointless in the end. (Even though Wandavision was the best, Monica Rambeau's story doesn't really make a difference, and Jimmy and Darcy really don't make a difference.)

#2 - Remakes

There's a fine line between "remake" and "adaptation". The Marvel movies thus far are generally adaptations, where the take the general outline of the story and characters, and make it into their own thing. The Marvel shows are almost nearly all remakes. They took very recent comics and turned them into TV shows, regardless of how they actually fit into the overall structure of the Marvel universe. Again, Wandavision is the good one, but even here, they have to shoehorn something about how Wanda grew up watching...I guess it's 5 different generations of television. It's just this sudden backstory about how she just loves television? Where did this come from?

Well, I'll tell you where it came from. It came from the comics, where shit like that can happen with little to no explanation, and it's totally fine. It was cool there, and it's nonsensical in the TV show.

The Aja-Fraction run on Hawkeye remains some of my favorite storylines and comics. They were irreverent and goofy, and were a great match for the character of Hawkeye, who is something like a working-class schlub and no-goodnik in the comics. In the MCU though, he's this family man and SHIELD agent and upstanding member of the community. In the Hawkeye show, suddenly he's going deaf (again, sudden backstory) and he's staying alone in the city instead of with his family for some reason. It's crap. It's crap. The obvious answer is to just make a new character who would fit that story better.