Another new Agent Carter promo poster!
Anonymous asked:
hi! sorry, but what do you mean with wanting agent carter to be to mcu what the hour was for bbc?
okayophelia answered:
[if you haven’t, watch the agent carter one-shot that inspired the hopefully-soon-to-be-confirmed agent carter series]
well it’s hard to explain unless you’ve seen the hour? but on a fundamental level what i mean is that the hour was a show with a beautiful and aesthetic sense of time that constructed complex, humane characters who were very much of their era while still being subversive and surprising and flawed
but specifically to the hour, was that it was a show based in the early era of broadcast journalism within the bbc itself, and explored the flaws and mistakes and values and cultures that drove the bbc and shaped it and what it would someday become in the modern day. so you have the bbc making a show about an earlier era of the bbc and interrogating itself, without ever devolving in dictatorial stories or reducing its characters to mouthpieces or cliches. much like i would hope an agent carter series would explore the foundations of SHIELD and the mcu as we know it, through the clear, nuanced eyes of characters we love like peggy carter.
and the hour combined those two things - very complex, human stories, and the larger conspiracies and paranoia of the time, and the interrogation of the nature of the bbc, into a wonderful multi-layered coherent whole
and it had shenanigans and love stories and tragedies and hiijinks and violence and darkness and brightness and poetry and laughter and witty banter and all these things, it never once reduced the era it was in to stereotype, nor did it reduce the people to plotpoints to serve the conspiracy or arc of the show, but rather they drove it.
that’s what i want out of the agent carter series. something that embraces that james bond era of spy film, while also embracing the darker paranoia, and the politics of the time, and all the meta ways the show can explore the foundation and shaping of SHIELD/the mcu
and doing it through the eyes of characters like peggy carter a la bel rowley, howard stark a la hector madden, and so on, though all those characters would of course be very much themselves, not just copy-pastes of the hour’s characters. i was just using those comparisons to give a kind of sense of what i mean.
so as the hour was to the bbc and broadcast journalism, is as i would want agent carter to be to SHIELD and espionage. the fact that they are both located in the era of cold war kind of paranoia and politics probably also feeds into it a bit. how the hour used + subverted + explored the cliches of that era of journalism/investigations could be how agent carter uses the tropes of james bond/espionage. cleverly, in homage, but also in very human, wonderful ways that aren’t about the trope but the people. idk idk it makes sense in my head!
