The story of the Marvel Cinematic Universe on television has been tumultuous and featured a lot of teeth-gnashing, starting with Agents of SHIELD on ABC back in 2013 and expanding with a bunch of series on Netflix (Daredevil, Jessica Jones, Luke Cage, Iron Fist, and The Defenders) and cable, before settling into the current Disney+ situation we have now. If we're being honest, there have been a lot more low points for the MCU's TV shows than high points. But when the MCU has been good on TV, it's been really good.
The range of quality among TV series in the MCU spans the full spectrum from absolutely embarrassing to best-of-the-decade good--sometimes even over the course of a single show. And the passage of time has also changed our perspective on some of the older series in particular. Some of those shows on Netflix, for example, actually hold up very well next to the newer and more expensive series on Disney+, which have tended to be pretty messy.
Another flashy new MCU limited series, Secret Invasion, has now wrapped up. Let's take a look at our rankings of the MCU on TV and see how the Samuel L. Jackson series stacks up. Oh, and just so you know: every single one of these series is now on Disney+.
19. Inhumans
While the cast was actually very decent, the show itself looked awful and hokey from the very start. And on top of that, it was a network show--Inhumans had almost no chance of being any good. The nail in its coffin, though, was the plan to also show the premiere episode on IMAX screens. When your show looks that cheap, making it much bigger isn't a good idea.
18. Iron Fist Season 1
The two seasons of Iron Fist are so dramatically different in quality that they need separate entries. The first season was the low point of Netflix's slate of Marvel shows--it played things very straight and lacked any self-awareness about how goofy of a character Danny Rand is. The result was a nearly unwatchable slog.
17. The Defenders
Netflix tried its hand at an Avengers-style crossover with its street-level Marvel heroes, complete with Sigourney Weaver as the baddie--and it ended up having so many humongous plot holes that it felt like they had forgotten to upload one of the episodes.
16. The Falcon and the Winter Soldier
There's a new, crappier Captain America who publicly murders people with the shield, Sharon Carter is now an evil crime lord, Zemo is suddenly a silly, non-serious character, and we've got bad guys who have completely valid and important complaints that are never truly addressed. But at least Sam Wilson got to solve America's problems by giving a heartfelt speech over the corpse of the dead villain, who was actually a refugee teenager.
15. Moon Knight
We only know that Moon Knight is in the MCU because we were told it is--it has no crossovers, cameos, references, veiled allusions, or any sense at all that superheroes exist. And on top of that, it's got a lot of very unconvincing CGI, and a profoundly annoying performance from Oscar Isaac.
14. Secret Invasion
This spy series gave us a fully self-contained story about an invasion of shapeshifting aliens that told a story that went nowhere and contained no major plot twists (is it actually a spy show if it has no real twists?), has no apparent connection with any other ongoing MCU storyline, and doesn't appear to have any relevance to The Marvels, the next MCU movie that will feature Samuel L Jackson as Nick Fury. Is there actually any reason to watch this?
13. Agents of SHIELD
There was always something kind of sad about the "s--t rolls downhill" nature of Agents of SHIELD tried as hard as it could to pretend like it was part of the cool kids' club even though the movies were never going to even look sideways at it. At least it had the decency to actually do spy movie stuff sometimes, unlike Secret Invasion--but it was still always very much a network TV show.
12. Luke Cage
Luke Cage worked much better as a floater character on the other shows than he fared on his own series, which went in a lot of different directions but never really found one that it could settle on. And then, just when it was getting interesting at the end of Season 2, the whole Marvel on Netflix situation was shut down.
11. Ms. Marvel
Its heart is undeniable and Iman Vellani is a real find, but Ms. Marvel felt cheap, and the very standardized look of the show clashed with its attempt at giving the MCU some Bollywood flavor. Kamala deserved a better introduction than this.
10. WandaVision
The evolving sitcom format of this series was a legitimately interesting aesthetic concept. But the plot ultimately couldn't sustain that format, and by the time it was all over, nothing really made sense anyway. Remember how this series brought in Evan Peters, who played an alternate version of Wanda's brother in the X-Men films, purely as a red herring joke for the audience, which has no in-universe meaning at all? Who knew that bit would foreshadow the utter lack of connectedness that has plagued the MCU ever since?
9. Loki
Like the trickster himself, this series is more flash than substance. It promised a smart and heady sci-fi story, but never actually tried to be one. Fortunately, Season 1 of Loki has so far just been irrelevant lore to the rest of the franchise--it's a "how the universe came to be" story that has no direct tie to any current happenings, and it's a casting reveal for Kang the Conqueror--so there hasn't been any reason to watch it anyway.
8. Hawkeye
Jeremy Renner and Hailee Steinfeld are fun and have a great rapport as the core duo in this story, which is a solid little crime story for the most part. But the ending with Kingpin felt like a late-stage reshoot that the rest of the series wasn't fully able to accommodate--and so the whole affair ends up feeling off.
7. Daredevil
The original Marvel series on Netflix always had at least a little too much going on--it was burdened with being the origin of this small-scale version of the MCU. But the mysteries were compelling, and the action was great. If we're being totally honest: Most of the best fight scenes in the entire MCU happened on this series.
6. Jessica Jones
This noir thriller series was always fascinating, and Krysten Ritter crushed it as the curmudgeonly drunk detective. Season 3, which was the last Marvel season on Netflix, went well off the rails in search of Jessica's origin story and certainly didn't give us a satisfying conclusion, but on the whole, this series remains a unique experience in the MCU, and one of the most emotionally sincere ones.
5. Iron Fist Season 2
After the obnoxious mess of that first season, Iron Fist pivoted hard in Season 2 by taking a lighter, B-movie tone that took Danny Rand less seriously, had much better fights, and took the story in an awesome new direction by stripping the power of the Iron Fist from Danny and giving it to Colleen Wing--and with Danny picking up some super cool chi-powered energy pistols. I bet Season 3 would have been a lot of fun.
4. What If…?
A frustrating amount of the MCU over the past five years or so has teased cool and fantastical concepts only to distill them down to some kind of cliched, mass-appeal theme that handwaves away any meaningful discussion of the cool sci-fi stuff--I'm looking at you, Quantumania. Without having to deal with the restraints of canonicity and overall franchise coherence, though, What If…? gets to actually follow all the way through with some really cool and really weird ideas. And that makes most of it worth watching.
3. Agent Carter
This spin-off series, about what happened with Peggy Carter after Stever Rogers went missing in 1945, isn't a particularly great series in a vacuum--it was very good for a network TV series, but it was still a network TV series. But in a franchise with so much stuff, you can get pretty far just on being something different. And a spy thriller TV show set in the 1950s is pretty different.
2. She-Hulk
Likewise, She-Hulk is a fourth-wall-breaking sitcom with an immensely likable lead in Tatiana Maslaney. I doubt I would have ever asked for a show like this one, and I don't even know that I would call it essential viewing. But it's clever, it's fun, and it tells a coherent story that wraps up in its own unique way--and that hasn't happened often in the MCU recently.
1. The Punisher
It's the most awesomely violent corner of the MCU, and it actually manages to deal with trauma with a level of care that other pieces of the MCU have never been able to. By Season 2, the series has the air of a group therapy session--our pals Frank, Dinah, Billy, Curtis, and more work out their issues while occasionally taking a break to have some kind of graphically violent action sequence. There's a sincerity to this show that doesn't exist anywhere else in the TV portion of the MCU aside from Jessica Jones.
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