This review contains spoilers for the first episode of “Agatha All Along.”
Jac Schaeffer, who created the first of the Disney+ Marvel series, “WandaVision,” and has now created the 11th, its spinoff “Agatha All Along,” is not one to let an idea go to waste.
In Schaeffer’s first series, a grieving superheroine used her magical powers to create a world for herself based on classic American sitcoms. It was entertaining to watch how the show reimagined those familiar comedies within a dark fantasy-science fiction framework. (At least until “WandaVision” went off the rails toward convoluted Marvel business as usual in its last few episodes.)
Now she starts “Agatha All Along,” which premiered Wednesday night on Disney+, with another detailed sendup. This time she puts her new main character — Agatha Harkness, a dangerous witch with a half-century history in Marvel comic books — inside a parody of the grim HBO crime drama “Mare of Easttown.” Still stuck where she was at the end of “WandaVision,” under a spell that strips her powers and any memory of who she really is, the fallen sorceress is now a cynical, violence-prone small-town police officer.
You may ask yourself how, in the three years that have elapsed between the two shows, Agatha has undergone a complete personality shift, from chirpy neighborhood noodge to hardened cop. You should be more concerned, though, with why the cop-show pastiche is so disappointing — so dull and aimless that talented comic actresses like Kathryn Hahn (who stars as Agatha) and Aubrey Plaza seem at a loss.
It is a relief when that show-within-a-show ends during the first episode, apparently a quick diversion rather than an integral element like the sitcom burlesques in “WandaVision.” (Four of the nine episodes of “Agatha All Along” were available for review.)
It has set a bad precedent, though. Even when the series shifts into its actual format — a jokey, jaggedly comic fantasy quest in which a group of unfulfilled women hit the road in search of their powers — the results are mostly perfunctory. Spells are cast, but not on the audience.
One challenge Schaeffer faces, a self-imposed one, is that the Agatha Harkness she has fashioned for her television shows is kind of a drag. In “WandaVision” Agatha was primarily a device, an unpleasant antagonist who made Wanda (Elizabeth Olsen), the heroine — who behaved very badly herself — look less bad in comparison.
Now that she is at the center of “Agatha All Along,” she is still selfish, vain, manipulative and condescending, but her flaws have not gained much interest or emotional resonance, and Hahn’s performance is uncharacteristically flat. References to a lost son suggest a plan to generate sympathy for Agatha; they also justify her unlikely compassion for a young male groupie played by Joe Locke of “Heartstopper.”
Surrounding Agatha, to provide a counterweight of softer sentiment and comic relief, is the crew of compromised witches she gathers for her quest. Walking the “witches’ road” to regain her powers requires a coven — the show indulges liberally in the arbitrary arcana of its genre — and the dirty half-dozen Agatha ends up with includes roles for appealing performers like Patti LuPone, Debra Jo Rupp (reprising her “WandaVision” role) and Sasheer Zamata. They are all good company, as are Locke as the try-hard aspiring witch and Plaza as a sardonic interloper from Agatha’s past.
They can’t turn base narrative into gold, though, and “Agatha All Along” slogs down its chosen path, with the coven squabbling and bonding through a series of frenetic but unexciting trials. The virtues of the theme of female empowerment are outweighed by the tired, generic story lines. There is a discernible current of barbed humor in the dialogue, but it’s not strong enough to turn on any lights.
Marvel’s sense of itself as an essential stage in the progression of American pop culture — if not its culmination — is on display in the show’s closing credits montage, which samples the range of American celluloid witchery from “The Wizard of Oz” to “Snow White,” “Bewitched” and “The Simpsons.” In that company, “Agatha All Along” just melts away.
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