My earliest memories all seem to revolve around the 1966 Batman television series starring Adam West and Burt Ward. It was a pretty pivotal show for me; it’s what made me first fall in love with comic books, and with the very concept of superheroes in general. In retrospect, I’m not sure if my parents actually liked watching it all that much, but they sure seemed to like watching me watch it, seeing the joy it brought me, and it became a fixture in our household. Reruns aired around the time my dad got home from work, so every day when he walked in the door I’d run over, jump up in his arms, and tell him who the Special Guest Villain was that day.
Television, and our rituals surrounding it, was the main thing that held my family together for most of my life. I felt closer to my mom when I’d stay up late on Thursday nights to watch ER with her despite barely following it, or when we’d watch whatever sappy TV movie Hallmark decided to air every Sunday night. I felt closer to my dad when we’d crack up at the Three Stooges or Are You Being Served? together. I felt special when my parents legitimately enjoyed my kids’ shows too; my dad especially was a fan of Rugrats, and we could joke together about Chuckie getting skunked or whine together about Nickelodeon constantly replaying the same episode where Tommy gets “nakey” over and over and over. My parents and I don’t really have all that much in common besides shared history, but the one thing that’s always been able to bring us together has been the television.
I know my family is far from alone in that regard.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the comfort television can bring, the way it brings people together, the rituals we create around it. Much of this has been spurred by WandaVision, Marvel’s first real attempt at bringing the big-screen superheroes of its cinematic universe to television1. The most recent episode (the series’ eighth, and penultimate) revolved around a series of flashbacks to key moments throughout Wanda Maximoff’s life, slowly spinning a tale of grief as she one-by-one loses everyone she’s ever cared about, eventually leading to her losing all control of her powers and inadvertently plunging an entire town into an illusion, a fantasy. Classic sitcoms continually pop up in those flashbacks, and while in a big picture sense this is used to justify WandaVision’s structure2, in a more character-driven sense it’s used to show how, in moments of pain, Wanda turned to the same source of comfort as most of us: television.
The first of these flashbacks is the most important. We’re introduced to Wanda and her twin brother as young children, living in war-torn Sokovia, their father hocking DVDs of American television shows to try to make a living. Life isn’t great, but it’s TV night, and for one night a week they can forget the war that’s literally right outside their window and just come together as a family to laugh; Wanda, specifically, always chooses the same episode to watch, comforted by the familiarity. I didn’t grow up in a fictional, stereotypically-third world country, but I can certainly see myself in Wanda here.
And then a bomb quite literally drops on their home.
It’s the first of many tragedies for Wanda, but throughout them all, sitcoms remain an important source of comfort in her life. She’s watching an episode of The Brady Bunch to keep calm before the life threatening experiment that gave her her powers. It’s an episode of Malcolm in the Middle that allows her to finally open up about her grief to the Vision, and Vision’s response which first makes her start falling for him. In confusing, stressful, out of control circumstances, it’s the comfort of sitcoms, of shows she loved as a child, that ground her, that bring some sense of comfort.
In the midst of a global pandemic, I think we can all relate to that. I keep a running list of all the media I consume every year, and in 2020 I watched over 200 more episodes of television than I did the previous year (around 650 episodes in 2020 compared to around 450 in 2019), yet I watched far less new television in 2020 than I did the year before. In the chaos of Covid-19 I, like many, returned to shows I’d seen a billion times, to the comfort of characters and stories I knew like the back of my hand.
For me it was quite often Parks and Recreation, and like Wanda’s reruns of choice, Parks is a sitcom. WandaVision didn’t make Wanda a fan of sitcoms at random; no other kind of series could fill this role. Sitcoms are designed to be comfort food. You don’t watch them for the plot; you watch them to spend time with characters you love, to be reassured by their presence. Sitcoms are as much a fantasy as Game of Thrones is; people may bicker, but they always love each other and come through in the end, and all problems are solved in 22 minutes (or 44 if it’s sweeps week). Is it any wonder we want to spend time in that kind of world when our own world is at its scariest? Is it any wonder that after facing unfathomable loss Wanda would quite literally reshape her world into a sitcom?
It’s also notable that sitcoms are designed to be comforting and reassuring, not just in content, but in structure as well. They all have their small rituals, recurring motifs from episode-to-episode. There’s, of course, the familiar theme song that opens every episode. There’s the laugh track, and the guaranteed moral learned at the end of the episode. There’s the more series-specific shticks that you can expect to pop up in just about every episode, be it Gilligan inadvertently sabotaging the castaways’ attempts to escape the island or the Munsters scaring away yet another one of Marilyn’s boyfriends and blaming it on her looks. There’s the catchphrases: “Did I do that?!”, “How rude!”, “What’chu talkin’ ‘bout Willis?”, or even less conventional entries like Kramer bursting through the door into Jerry’s apartment week after week. Sitcoms thrive on repetition to create familiarity and affection, and that’s what makes them so comforting in times of stress.
Of course, sitcoms don’t hold a patent on these kind of rituals. The aforementioned Adam West Batman practically ran on them. Most episodes opened with the traditional slide down the Bat-Pole and with the Dynamic Duo leaping into the Batmobile, and Robin reading off the atomic power levels before the car took off. At least once an episode a celebrity would pop out of a window to deliver a one-liner as Batman and Robin scaled a building. Every episode ended with a cliffhanger, with our heroes caught in a deathtrap. Shows for little kids tend to follow the same strict structure every episode, just changing minor details, knowing kids thrive on routine. Much of the anime I loved as a teen ran on recycled animation, such as the transformation sequences in Sailor Moon or Digimon’s Digivolution scenes, and I absolutely ate them up. Yeah, part of that was because they always signaled an episode reaching its action climax, but I also just really loved the ritual of it all. I loved that I could expect these really visually interesting sequences every single episode, and they never let me down.
WandaVision gets that much of our love of television stems, not just from the shows themselves, but from the relationships we forge with them, the roles they take in our lives, the time we carve out for them, and the creators behind it understand this not just on a writing level, but from a production standpoint as well. Most streaming shows over the past decade have followed the binge model, with entire seasons dropping at once. Each new season of, say, Stranger Things is a major event, with everybody attempting to watch an entire season in a weekend to stay culturally literate, but by the next week it’s largely been forgotten.
Sitcoms, though, don’t really flourish in this model. They can’t create the kind of rapport they need to connect with viewers in a few scant hours over a day or two; they become cultural institutions by persisting, enduring, being there week after week, year after year. Disney+ certainly understands this; neither WandaVision nor The Mandalorian are sitcoms, but they benefit from this model nonetheless. Releasing just one new episode every week has kept WandaVision on people’s minds far longer than it would have otherwise, and stretching out its central mystery over nine week has made speculation rampant, kept people far more engaged in its narrative than they would have been if they could have gotten the answers to all their questions in a single afternoon. It’s a smart, smart move because it remembers that, at its heart, television is about rituals, not events.
I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. The films of the Marvel Cinematic Universe have been the sitcoms of blockbuster movies for a while now — not necessarily in their content, but because they’re comfort food, in the fact that they’ve been releasing on a consistent schedule for over a decade, luring people back to the theater again and again with the promise of spending more time with familiar characters and wild scenarios. Is there really much of a difference between my watching T.G.I.F every week with my best friend as a child and my attending all the Avengers midnight showings with my buddies every couple of years? One’s really just a bigger version of the other, and I’ll always, always be in awe of the power film, television, and stories have to bring people together.
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Speaking of loving television, I’ve been listening to a new podcast that’s right up that alley. It’s called Too Long; Didn’t Watch, and the concept is that each week Rolling Stone television critic Alan Sepinwall brings on a celebrity guest and together they watch the first and last episode of a show the celebrity has never seen before. Much of the joy comes from the particular celebrity guest stars chosen, of course, but also from seeing how they engage with the material. If you’ve ever wanted to hear Jon Hamm craft elaborate theories about Gossip Girl, or hear America’s Sweetheart Alison Brie become overwhelmed by the amount of incest in Game of Thrones, then by golly, this is the show for you! I haven’t gotten to listen to last week’s episode yet, but it’s Megan Mullally and Nick Offerman watching My So Called Life and I can’t think of anything I’ve ever needed more.
I can’t find a way to connect this one to television, but I also want to plug a great film my movie club recently watched, 2014’s The History of Time Travel. It’s a mockumentary from a world where time travel is real, and while neither its take on time travel nor its story are super original, what really blew me away was the execution. The History of Time Travel tells its story and unravels its high concept in extremely subtle, confident ways, forcing the viewer to pay attention and become invested, and it definitely rewards multiple viewings. This one is streaming on Amazon Prime for free, and is very much worth a look.
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“Do You Know What I Love the Most?” is a newsletter from Spencer Irwin about his relationships with the stories he loves. Spencer is an enthusiast and writer from Newark, Delaware, who likes punk rock, comic books, working out, breakfast, and most of all, stories. His previous work appeared on Retcon Punch, One Week One Band, and Crisis on Infinite Chords, and he can be found on Twitter at @ThatSpenceGuy. If you like this newsletter, please subscribe and share with your friends!
Logo by Lewis Franco, with respects to Saves the Day.
This isn’t the first Marvel television show, and it’s not even the first TV show set within the MCU — Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., the Netflix Defenders shows, and even the likes of Hulu’s Runaways or Freeform’s Cloak and Dagger were all nominally set within the MCU, but they also shared none of their big screen talent and went entirely unacknowledged by the movies. WandaVision stars at least five characters from the movies — including two Avengers! — and is clearly going to have ramifications on future projects with these characters. Marvel Studios actually cares about this show and is giving it the kind of push it would normally reserve for its films, which is appreciated.
Each episode of WandaVision is an homage to a classic sitcom (The Dick Van Dyke Show, Bewitched, The Brady Bunch, Family Ties, Malcolm in the Middle, and Modern Family), and they’re so lovingly crafted that I honestly resent it a bit when the ongoing story/Marvel Universe starts to butt in. I’d watch an entire season of black-and-white Wanda and Vision hiding their powers from their neighbors, or Billy narrating his parents’ failings to the camera as generic early 2000s pop-punk plays in the background.