WandaVision‘s use of sitcom tropes made it stand out from the rest of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The show was praised for how well it recreated the feeling of different decades of television. Up until episode eight, the amount of time and money put into recreating the feeling of classic shows felt fun but fairly arbitrary. By this point in the series, it seems the show is done with these masterful homages. If there are future seasons as Marvel Studio’s boss Kevin Feige neither confirms nor denies, it seems that would have to be quite different from this season as the sitcom structure has fulfilled its purpose in the show.
In Episode 4, the quirky audience surrogate Darcy Lewis, after watching multiple episodes of WandaVision herself asks “Why does it keep switching time periods? It can’t be purely for my enjoyment.” Episode 8 titled ‘Previously On’ delivers the show’s answer to that question. The episode has a structure similar to Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, with Agatha Harkness giving Wanda a tour of her past. The first memory they revisit is one of the nights she and her family would watch tv shows to practice their English.
Some of the shows in their collection include I Love Lucy, The Addams Family, Bewitched, Who’s The Boss?, I Dream of Jeannie, Malcolm in the Middle, and most importantly The Dick Van Dyke Show. These sitcoms distract the family from the hostile war happening outside their window. They calmly discuss the meaning of the word “shenanigan.” Young Wanda describes it as a “problem that is more silly than scary but sometimes can be a little scary.” Her dad says it is like “silly mischief that always becomes fine.” Wanda has a similar discussion with Vision in a later memory after the death of her brother Pietro at The Avengers Compound. Wanda explains the reason she knows Hal in Malcolm in the Middle is safe and will not be seriously injured. “It’s not that kind of show,” she says.
Episode 8 is something of a love story between Wanda and another machine: television. Sitcoms are something present in almost all of Wanda’s memories explored in this episode. Miraculously there is a TV set still running The Dick Van Dyke Show in the background while Wanda and her brother are at a standstill waiting with a Stark industries bomb in their house that turns out to be a dud. The Brady Bunch is the only thing to keep her company when held in prison by Hydra. She watches TV in The Avengers Compound to distract herself from the recent death of her brother. Wanda uses television as a way to avoid dealing with the feeling of emptiness that comes from all of the tragedies in her life and we see at the end of this episode the way she quite literally escapes to a town that she transforms into versions of the sitcoms that meant so much to her.
Wanda becomes a character who takes on the persona of a housewife from a 1950’s sitcom. This kind of performative character plays differently in the current era. There is something off about the unattainable happiness that characters of that time exhibited which explains the existence of a movie like The Stepford Wives. The performance seems exaggerated and therefore audiences may wonder if there is something hidden that is a reason they are overcompensating.
While this is not the intention in, say, Bewitched, there are glimpses of something closer to real life when Wanda breaks character due to conflicts that stand in the way of her escape such as Monica mentioning Ultron back in episode 3. Whereas many shows from the ’50s and ’60s were created by men and portray in a sense their idea of a perfect housewife, WandaVision uses the sitcom to show Wanda’s repression and her desire to live as a peaceful perfect woman in a perfect peaceful town.
Even when the show explores later decades, Wanda may become more honest about her faults but they are still deflected through humor like when she speaks to the camera in episode 7 and brushes off the fact that she expanded the boundaries of her fantasy world.
In episode 8, Wanda finally is able to put her past and her decision to escape into a fully realized world of television into context. Elizabeth Olsen is finally able to show more of her range as an actress as Wanda is finally free to feel and express her true emotions. Episode 8 shows that television was there for Wanda when no one else could be and that it is her oldest friend. It serves as a tool to distract which is helpful in some cases but the fantasy presented by television replaced reality for her and imprisoned her and others in a place where her past was always there waiting to haunt her.
It’s interesting to think that WandaVision was not intended to be the first Marvel show to be released on Disney Plus when it deals with the form of television in a fairly interesting meta-textual way. It’s unclear if the finale will play with the sitcom form in any way or if it will become something like a miniature Marvel movie.
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