While Marvel is currently doing some of their most impressive work to date over on Netflix, they’ve yet to really hit their stride on network television. Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. debuted on ABC back in 2013 and has struggled with ratings ever since, and Agent Carter, which starred fan-favorite character Peggy Carter (Hayley Atwell), only lasted two seasons before getting the axe.
Of course, there’s also Damage Control and Most Wanted. The former, which is a sitcom following a “Marvel cleaning crew who specializes in dealing with the aftermath of the unique fallout from super hero conflicts,” has unfortunately still not come to fruition. Most Wanted, meanwhile, was set to be a S.H.I.E.L.D. spinoff but at the last minute, ABC chose not to move forward with it.
While Marvel is looking to land a home run this September with The Inhumans, it’s still a shame that some of their past efforts have struggled so much and that’s particularly true when it comes to Agent Carter. Not only did the show have a small, but very dedicated fanbase, but it was also quite good and displayed a lot of promise throughout its first two seasons. Unfortunately, though, the ratings just didn’t pull through and at the end of the day, the decision whether to keep it around or not really wasn’t up to Marvel.
That’s according to the studio’s TV head, Jeph Loeb, who told Entertainment Weekly the following while chatting with them about The Defenders:
Unlike the movie studio where they can say, ‘In 2019 we’re making Captain Marvel,’ the television division doesn’t have that ability. We are, at the end of the day, beholden to the network that we’re on. So for all of you Agent Carter fans out there, we didn’t cancel the show.
Though some are still holding out hope for a revival, perhaps on Netflix, it’s not looking likely at this point. The time for that has probably come and gone. While it’s not impossible for it to happen in a few years from now (after all, look how long Arrested Development took to return), we wouldn’t hold our breath. The show had a loyal fanbase, yes, but it never truly caught on enough to pull in the ratings it needed to justify its existence.
So, while Peggy Carter may not be coming back any time soon (or maybe even at all) then, thankfully we’ve got a lot of exciting things to look forward to from Marvel when it comes to the small screen. Aside from what they’re doing on Netflix, they’ve also got The Inhumans, as we mentioned above, as well as Freeform’s Cloak & Dagger and Hulu’s The Runaways.
How these upcoming shows will turn out is still hard to say, since we’ve really seen next to nothing from them, but they do sound promising and we’re hopeful that they fare a bit better than poor old Agent Carter, which really didn’t deserve to be axed after just two seasons.
