Agent Carter

The Major Crimes Unit meets the Marvel Cinematic Universe. We break down every MCU appearance of HBO’s ‘The Wire’ cast, from ‘Thor’ to Hulu’s ‘Runaways.’

The debut of Marvel’s Punisher spinoff brings the grand total of MCU and X-universe series up to eleven; soon to be twelve with Hulu’s Runaways. From the slums of Hell’s Kitchen to the moon, the time is now to rank all of Marvel’s current-generation live-action series, including our beloved Defenders, mutants and more.

Spoiler alert - one of them is a very good boy.

One of the underrated aspects of Marvel’s cinematic universe is its overabundance of good characters. Take Hayley Atwell’s Agent Carter, for example. Most other major movie franchises would jump at the opportunity to have a character as beloved as Peggy Carter; for Marvel, fairly or unfairly, she’s a character they can afford to leave behind. That is, until it was announced that Captain Marvel would take place sometime in the 1990s, opening the door for Atwell’s Carter to appear once more in the MCU. Would she be interested in coming back to play the character? You’d better believe it.

ABC might have attempted to bury this news in the midst of Election 2016, but Agent Carter fans have another pressing concern. Hayley Atwell’s ABC series Conviction has officially been canceled, but is it good news or bad?

If it weren’t clear already, we’ve officially entered the superhero TV arms race. Not content with Daredevil or its three followups into The Defenders, Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. has officially begun development of a new potential spinoff for ABC, but who might take the lead, and what does it mean for Agent Carter?

Agent Carter, Marvel's second live action TV show set in its cinematic shared universe, made its debut with a two-hour double-bill on ABC on Tuesday night, with Hayley Atwell reprising her role as spy Peggy Carter. Atwell's Carter debuted in the 2011 movie Captain America: The First Avenger, based on a character created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, and she's now the second character from the movies to spin off into her own show, following Phil Coulson (Clark Gregg) in Agents of SHIELD. Agents of SHIELD is now on its second season, and trying to recover its energy after a largely awful first season. Agent Carter will run for only eight episodes across seven weeks, rather than a standard 20+ episode season -- a format arguably closer to what Marvel plans to do with its Netflix TV shows -- so it may be the better test of Marvel's TV ambitions. In Cartergraphy, I'll be recapping the show every week using my new 'S.S.R.' method, breaking it down into Strategic Review, Scientific Analysis, and Reserved Englishness.