After a break of eight months, Marvel has finally served up a new live-action TV series in the form of Agatha All Along. If you ask WandaVision lovers, it’s exactly what we’ve been waiting for the past three years — a compelling, creative ride down the Witches’ Road. There’s a ton of positive buzz on social media, but a glimpse at Rotten Tomatoes somehow tells a very different story.
At the time of writing, Agatha All Along is sitting at 74% on Rotten Tomatoes. Now, that is still a respectable fresh score, but due to the way that TV ratings tend to be much more generous than those for films that means it’s still shockingly low for a Marvel series. For comparison, WandaVision is sitting pretty with a 92% Tomatometer. Agatha‘s score will obviously change somewhat over the rest of the show’s run, but at current estimations, its RT rating means it is officially the third worst MCU show, behind Secret Invasion (52%) and Echo (70%).
But is Agatha really deserving of such an ignominious placement in the pecking order, or is the show under a sinister hex of its own?
It’s no secret why Agatha All Along is performing poorly on Rotten Tomatoes
The curious thing about Agatha‘s Rotten Tomatoes scores is that while the critic rating is steadily increasing, proving that more positive reviews are rolling in as critics wake up to the show’s brilliance, its audience score is going in the opposite direction. Early audience reactions — aka the Popcornmeter — were upwards of 80% but now they’re slipping, with the user score also at 74% at the time of writing.
This is tragically not a surprise, given the ranking of Marvel’s prior shows via audience scores. The bottom three? Echo (61%), Secret Invasion (44%), and She-Hulk: Attorney at Law (32%). Notice what two of those have in common… They have female leads. And, sure, while Secret Invasion was viewed as a major disappointment with whoever you ask, the fact that its finale saw a female character become the most powerful being in the MCU (Emilia Clarke’s G’iah) probably didn’t help endear it to a certain subset of “fans.”
Review-bombing, particularly for Disney projects, has become a serious, ever-growing problem in recent times, as cancelled series like The Acolyte can attest to. The pattern has become depressingly easy to predict — Show X is promoted as featuring a strong female-fronted energy or containing LGBTQ+ characters and themes, Show X gets unusually low RT ratings. Things are the same elsewhere, too — on IMDb, Agatha has sunk to an unjust 6.7.
In Agatha All Along, Kathryn Hahn’s eponymous character finally escapes a hex that once made her think she was still living in the 1950s. Apparently, certain amateur reviewers out there need to escape from their own similar mental prisons. In the meantime, the rest of us can watch Agatha get better and better as it continues with new episodes Wednesdays on Disney Plus, concluding Oct. 30.