“Agatha All Along” is an amusing “WandaVision” follow-up that lacks a clear purpose

Kathryn Hahn reprises her role as Agatha Harkness alongside a coven of new characters.

It’s been three years since WandaVision inaugurated a new era of Marvel television, and yet no subsequent show in that time has been able to match WandaVision’s success with either critics or audiences. Some of these Marvel Cinematic Universe series (like Secret Invasion) seem to have immediately disappeared down a cultural memory hole, while others (like Ms. Marvel) feel a little redundant with the MCU movie that followed. So it makes sense that the latest Marvel offering on Disney+, Agatha All Along, opts to directly tie itself to WandaVision, both in terms of plot and recreating various period aesthetics. But as a result, Agatha All Along hasn’t been able to demonstrate a clear purpose of its own, at least so far.

As indicated by the title, Agatha All Along stars Kathryn Hahn reprising her WandaVision role as the witch Agatha Harkness. The new series begins with Agatha finally breaking out of the prison she was trapped in by Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen) at the end of that show, and setting out on a journey to regain her magical power.

She’s assisted in this by a young unnamed man (Heartstopper’s Joe Locke), who seeks a magical path called the “Witches’ Road” and inspires Agatha to do so as well. “Unnamed” isn’t a joke; whenever Locke’s character tries to introduce himself to others, a magical spell (or “sigil”) prevents him from saying his name. On the one hand, that’s a clever way to incorporate Marvel spoiler paranoia into the text of the show (especially since rumors abound that Locke is really playing Billy Kaplan/Wiccan, Wanda’s son who is destined to play an important role in the future Young Avengers story that's being slowly set up), but on the other hand it feels like Disney having its cake and eating it too, as well as preventing viewers from fully investing in the character from the jump.

Related: How Agatha All Along channels the history of iconic pop culture witches

There are also a bunch of other new characters! Sasheer Zamata, Ali Ahn, Patti LuPone, and Aubrey Plaza play witches with different specialties who Agatha hastily recruits into her new “coven” in order to overcome the difficulties of the Witches’ Road as a group. Several of these actresses are delightful screen presences, but their screentime feels both squeezed and rushed; they’re all thrown at the viewer in short order, and are then competing with one another for room to establish their own backstories and arcs. Plaza’s best Marvel work remains her rip-roaring performance as the personification of the demonic Shadow King in FX’s Legion; here’s hoping she can reach similarly unrestrained heights by the end of Agatha All Along.

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As you may remember, WandaVision wasn’t just a story about Vision (Paul Bettany) and the Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olsen) trying to recover from the events of Avengers: Endgame. It also parodied the history of television comedies, from I Love Lucy-style housewife sitcoms up through the modern era of Modern Family-esque mockumentaries. Agatha All Along attempts a similar stylistic exercise, but the reasoning feels much less organic to the story. The series starts with an amusing bit about Agatha being trapped in a prestige TV crime series instead of a housewife sitcom, and then the parodies continue as the characters embark on the Witches’ Road.

Along the road, the coven encounters different magical houses, each with their own theme. One throws them into white dresses and sensible sweaters befitting the cast of a Nancy Meyers movie (“It’s giving middle-aged ‘second chance at love’ vibes, and I am here for it,” Locke declares upon entering), while another dresses them in ‘70s rockstar outfits worthy of Stevie Nicks. These parodies are knowing, well done, and keep one episode visually distinct from the next, but they are also jarring. It’s hard to establish a rhythm with this show, especially when the different homages feel more disconnected from each other than WandaVision moving smoothly between different sitcom eras.

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Music is a recurring element of Agatha All Along; the Witches’ Road can only be accessed by singing! This choice makes sense, since Agatha’s biggest moment in WandaVision was a musical one, but the reason “Agatha All Along” hit so hard in the first place was because it was WandaVision’s singular musical moment.

Only the first four episodes of Agatha All Along (out of an announced nine) were made available to critics for this review, so the possibility remains that these disparate elements will come together in a satisfying way when the whole arc of the show is clear. For now, Agatha All Along makes a fun enough Halloween season watch for those who love witchy classics like Practical Magic and The Craft, but won’t strike most Marvel fans as essential viewing. Grade: C+

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