'WandaVision': A Sitcom Pastiche That's Funny Peculiar

Photo credit: Disney+/Marvel
Photo credit: Disney+/Marvel
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From Esquire

This review of WandaVision contains mild spoilers. If you want to go in cold, you'll probably want to reverse straight out of here.

After a year out, Marvel returns with WandaVision. Having gone as big as big could possibly be with Avengers: Endgame, WandaVision scales things right back to the size of a suburban front room. Wanda and Vision aren't in our reality anymore; they're a couple of young sitcom newlyweds who've just moved to Westview, though their new neighbours are unaware that they are, respectively, able to manipulate the fabric of reality and a sentient super-computer.

They seem happy: Wanda's a kooky housewife trying to fit in with the neighbourhood, and Vision's now a slightly gawky kind of indestructible superman, flipping between his big red head and his company man human form. It's a bit like Mork & Mindy, but they're both Mork.

They're in a white picket fence confection of middle America, and the black-and-white aw-shucks capers of the first two episodes are straight out of The Dick Van Dyke Show, I Love Lucy and The Honeymooners. Vision isn't dead now, and he's just started a new job – but wouldn't you know it, his boss and his wife are coming over for dinner! Hilarity ensues, in a way.

But there's something disquieting at the centre of the suburban tranquility. Why can't they remember where they moved from? What exactly is Vision's job? And why isn't he dead anymore? More questions start piling up. The neighbours start whispering.

It's a slow burn. The first three episodes – that's as far as the press previews go, and only the first two are out today – seed the weirdness gradually. You can feel WandaVision straining for Twin Peaks uncanniness, and sometimes it manages it: a glitching radio in the second episode chops and twists the Beach Boys' 'Help Me Rhonda' into something closer to 'help me, Wanda'; a glass shatters; livid, red blood punctures the monochrome world. More often, though, without the sense of where exactly any of this is going, it's closer to the breadcrumb dropping of Lost.

Photo credit: Disney+/Marvel
Photo credit: Disney+/Marvel

It's early days, of course, but until the second half of episode three it seems quite pleased with itself for having nailed the American sitcom thing got the scripting and the performances and the lighting and the lenses right – the first couple of episodes are even mixed in mono for that particular Fifties sound – and ends up drifting in between its sitcom-puncturing moments. There are quite long stretches where the straightforward pastiche gets a bit wearing. Sometimes it's great; sometimes you get the feeling The Truman Show did all this much better. One thing that is genuinely excellent though: Paul Bettany channelling Rik Mayall in episode two, when Vision's innards get gummed up and he becomes suddenly pissed just before he has to do a magic show.

That said, it is still bold and interesting, and is set to get more interesting from here. Advertising breaks in the scheduled programming introduce us to toasters made by Stark Enterprises and soap from the Hydra Corporation are witty and might point to exactly what the point of it all is, and the finale of the third episode takes off into more familiarly Marvel-ish tech conspiracy territory. I'll say no more because spoilers, obviously, but it features a very neat use of the Monkees' 'Daydream Believer'. For all its sitcom stylings, WandaVision really takes its time getting to its punchline.

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