Give executive producer Kevin Feige and the Marvel team credit for this: They are willing to take a risk on a creative vision. 

We saw this when Taika Waititi bucked expectations from previous Thor movies for a stalwart, iron-jawed hero. Instead he made Ragnarok into a goofy buddy comedy. We saw it when the studio not only gambled on bizarre characters from a minor comic with almost zero name recognition (Guardians of the Galaxy), then handed the reins over to a little-known horror director (James Gunn). And now, having transformed superhero movies from the gritty Sturm und Drang of Batman to lighthearted extravaganzas, Marvel has taken yet another unexpected turn: downsizing and going introspective with perhaps its strangest offering to date, WandaVision.

The Disney+ series, airing in weekly installments like The Mandalorian, couldn’t lean any further into its small-screen stature without falling over. 

When we left Wanda Maximoff, aka the Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olsen), in Avengers: Endgame, the infinity stones had resurrected her from Thanos’ cosmic death snap. Her android love, Vision (Paul Bettany), however, was killed before the great disintegration, and can therefore ne’er return. 

The first episode of WandaVision offers no bridge from the couple’s final separation except what we can infer from the fantasy setting—a black-and-white, laugh-tracked sitcom à la I Love Lucy or Dick Van Dyke. The next two episodes update the period incrementally, going from a Bewitched-style backdrop to something more like The Brady Bunch. But the false cheeriness and contrived dilemmas don’t alter, except when a bossy neighbor breaks character to telegraph something like real terror through her pleading gaze. Or when an eerie voice with a decidedly modern accent comes through the old RCA radio.