Agatha All Along review: Kathryn Hahn gets caught up in purposeless Marvel spinoff
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Is it too hard for Marvel to stay focused and emotionally invested on one character rather than create more spinoffs or draw extended parallels to create suspense? Probably yes. Agatha All Along gets some help from creator Jac Schaeffer to get a spinoff of WandaVision, where Agatha Harkness (Kathryn Hahn) comes to realize that she might be missing out on things that she is not aware of. Of course she is right.
An uninspired start
It starts off a bit too annoyingly for its own game. (Episode 1-4 were screened in advance.) Here comes Agnes of Westview, who is the jaded, unsmiling counterpart to Mare Sheehan, which was played by Kate Winslet in Mare of Easttown. It fetched her an Emmy. Here, Agnes only fetches intruders. First at work, and then at her abode. Enter Aubrey Plaza as Agent Vidal, assigned to help her with the murder investigation, which is just another case for the actor to slip into a part of a sarcastic weirdo. The most amount of assistance she can provide is perhaps the delivery of this line: "It’s a universally acknowledged truth that a lady cop cannot be good at her job and have a healthy personal life at the same time.” Then there is Joe Locke, the twink from Netflix's Heartstopper who is just known as 'teen', caught stealing from her house, only to lead into a darker secret for Agatha in the run.
What are Agatha's motivations? As pieces of her monotonous backstory emerge, the audience is made to sit through parallels, with the Mare of Easttown parody coming off as totally unnecessary for the progression of the plot. With so many spells left to cast, the lackluster introduction only feels like a presumptuous diversion. Agatha will be at a loss to decipher what teen has to tell about his backstory as a curse prevents her from hearing those words. The two of them then strive to put a team of witches together, which includes Patti LuPone, Sasheer Zamata, Jennifer Kale, Debra Jo Rupp and Ali Ahn.
Final thoughts
Each of the witches specialize in a particular kind of magic, but none of them combined can save the show from its cluelessness in the first half. Details become less important for this fantasy comedy of sorts, as the show does not know where it wants to commit itself too. The plot is too busy in hiding, the characters too busy in sounding like nincompoops.
What is so frustrating is that the show is consistently trying to fit the parameters of franchise extensions. It clearly doesn't want to exist for its own sake, a curse that cannot be broken by Hahn's spirited performance here. Agatha All Along is in a mad rush; a rush with little humour, that doesn't want to stick to any rules of the genre. More revelations, more expositions. In this rush, it lets go of world-building and backstories for these supporting characters. Even by Marvel's own standards of universe expansion, the potion is just too weak for these witches to conjure up any magic worth noting.
Agatha All Along is available to stream on Disney + Hotstar.
