Here’s a lesson for all future MCU TV series: If a two-minute appearance by a well-known guest star can change the face of your show, elevating the energy level and making your audience perk up and take notice, more so than any action scene or character beat before or after, there’s a foundational issue with […]
Tag: MCU
Pop Culture Maniacs Podcast Episode #18: Movie Franchises and Cinematic Universes
Kieran Freemantle and Jean Henegan discuss Hollywood’s increased dependence on movie franchises and the art of making a cinematic universe.
The Falcon and The Winter Soldier – The Whole World is Watching
The biggest benefit to television is that it allows writers to spend time developing characters over the course of hours across a season, rather than being confined to the mere two-hour window provided by most films. As I’ve written about before in these pieces, that was the greatest boon I could see from Marvel branching […]
The Falcon and The Winter Solider – Power Broker Review
When I began recapping WandaVision, I wrote that I was worried the series would feel more like doing homework for the upcoming Doctor Strange film (since Wanda had already been announced as a key character for that film) than a standalone series. After all, why bother to make a TV show about MCU characters when […]
The Falcon and The Winter Soldier – The Star-Spangled Man Review
Amazing how much better a show like The Falcon and The Winter Soldier becomes when you allow the titular characters (who have a proven track record of solid chemistry together) to actually work with one another! And, with a lot of the table-setting and expositional work handled in the series premiere (noting how messed up […]
Fan Control: Why Giving Into Fandom Outrage is Bad for Hollywood
On Thursday, March 18, HBOMax (and by extension, Warner Brothers) released the “Snyder Cut” – writer-director Zack Snyder’s recut version of Warner Brother’s 2017 disappointment Justice League, the culmination of a years-long campaign by a very vocal segment of the internet who hated the original version of the film and demanded that the studio allow […]
Falcon and The Winter Soldier – New World Order Review
There’s a history in television of outgoing showrunners – the person or people who are the last word in the narrative flow and character development within a TV show – ending their run on the series with a major revelation or cliffhanger, thus forcing the new showrunner to figure a way out of a seemingly […]
Pop Culture Maniacs Podcast Episode #15: WandaVision
Kieran Freemantle and Jean Henegan discuss and review the hit Disney+ show WandaVision P
WandaVision – The Series Finale Review
Finales are notoriously difficult to execute successfully when a show is just a simple procedural drama or episodic sitcom. That degree of difficulty grows exponentially when the series has a rabid fan base and has presented a quasi-puzzle box tale throughout its run (and if the show is all of that, plus years of waiting […]
WandaVision – Previously On Review
What a tour de force performance from Elizabeth Olsen in “Previously On,” the WandaVision that attempts to fill in all the gaps (and boy, were there a ton of gaps) in Wanda’s MCU history. But Wanda wasn’t the only character getting some backstory in the penultimate episode of the series. We also learned a bit […]










