The MCU on TV is mired in an awkward transitional period right now — Marvel Studios knows it needs to fix things, but before it can do that it’s first got to knock out the shows already on the docket. First up in 2024? Echo.
Echo‘s in a rough place as it’s a lead-in to 2025’s Daredevil: Born Again, perhaps the biggest casualty of Marvel’s restructuring of its TV production, which is currently being remade from top to bottom with a fresh creative team after Kevin Feige didn’t like what he was seeing. Something similar it seems happened to Echo itself, as the show was cut down from 6-8 episodes (it depends on who you ask) to just five in post-production.
Despite these troubles, there was some serious hype for Echo among the hardcore fanbase thanks to its status as an honorary member of the Defenders Saga. However, now that it’s here, it’s only brought an uncomfortable truth, one that we all already knew deep down, to the fore: that Netflix was better at making Marvel shows than Disney Plus, in one key way.
Echo makes abundantly clear what Marvel needs to borrow from Netflix to save the MCU on TV
Those with long memories might recall a common complaint that critics lodged against what we now call the Defenders Saga shows: they were too long. Well, I hope those critics are happy now as, fast forward several years, and most MCU Disney Plus shows are blasted for being way too short. What was once viewed by some as a flaw was really a major positive that Disney could do well remembering.
Sure, while certain seasons of the saga definitely stumbled in stretching their plots and character arcs across the full run of episodes, Netflix’s system of handing out 13-episode orders to its Marvel series was a real blessing. Having such a significant amount of time to build up the storyline, the threat of the villain, and the problems that were mounting up for the heroes ensured that viewers were hooked and fully invested in every twist and turn. Again, most of the time. I know you haven’t forgotten about Iron Fist, and I haven’t either.
Unfortunately, the issue facing many of the Marvel Disney Plus series is that six episodes is simply not enough to build up the same kind of investment in the characters and the stories. And that’s something that Echo makes more visible than ever, thanks to its especially short five-part run — making it the slimmest live-action MCU show on the platform to date. And when you consider that it spends half of its opening episode recapping the events of Hawkeye, it ends up even shorter.
Once, there was a sign that Marvel was learning its lesson on this front, as Daredevil: Born Again was originally commissioned to have a whopping 18 episodes. Sadly, it seems unlikely this is still going to be the case following the show’s creative overhaul. In general, things are looking up for the MCU on TV, as clearly the studio is aware that it needs to do better than Echo, but if it really wants to succeed then Marvel must be big enough to admit it needs to return to what Netflix got right.
