Jac Schaeffer knows how to make good TV. After directing and writing the criminally underrated 2009 sci-fi movie Timer, she made her showrunner debut with WandaVision. As Marvel’s first Disney+ original, it was the perfect entry into the televisual medium: a superhero story of grief and trauma projected through homages to classic television. Now, she’s repeating that success with Agatha All Along, the spinoff devoted to WandaVision fan-favorite Agatha Harkness (Kathryn Hahn) as she tries to regain her powers by traveling the Witches’ Road.
With two Marvel shows under her belt, Schaeffer has become an unlikely pillar of MCU TV — a development that was a big surprise to Schaeffer.
“I was always a feature person. I admired greatly people who could do TV,” she tells Inverse. But writing television shows turned out to be easier than she thought. “What made sense to me with these shows was the ability to tell a larger arc story, but to sprinkle these mysteries and twists throughout.”
While other Marvel shows operate like long movies chopped up into chapters, Schaeffer’s works fully embrace the increasingly lost art of the singular episode.
“It's made me realize how difficult feature writing is because you always bottom out at the end of the second act around minute 70, and everything kind of grinds to a halt,” she says. “With TV, you can avoid that. In each episode, you're like, ‘Okay, what am I accomplishing here? What are my reveals? What's going to be my cliffhanger?’”
It’s that approach that has informed what many see as the biggest downside of Schaeffer’s work: There’s simply not enough of it. Episodes of WandaVision and Agatha All Along sometimes run up to 50 minutes, but often last for half an hour or less.
“I know people are sometimes disheartened that some of the episodes are short, and I feel bad about that.”
“It sort of forces an economy that I think enhances the entertainment possibilities,” Schaeffer says. “I know people are sometimes disheartened that some of the episodes are short, and I feel bad about that and I wish I could provide more, but I'm also like, let's keep it popping.”
Agatha All Along is coming up on its two-episode finale. By this point, WandaVision had already ditched its sitcom-of-the-week structure, transforming into more of a traditional Marvel movie for an epic setpiece finale that left some fans disappointed. Schaeffer won’t reveal whether Agatha All Along will follow that pattern or buck it, but she hints that Agatha’s finale will feel more like a movie than what’s come before.
“What the WandaVision writers’ room was trying to accomplish is, we wanted the back half of the season to crack open emotionally and for the important bits to be about Wanda's journey and to be about the family and the revealing of the personal truths and grappling with that,” she says. “Agatha has a similar trajectory in that as the show moves forward, the material becomes a little more dramatic and grounded. But it's still our sassy Agatha show, so you can expect some yuk yuks still to come. There’s more of the road left to go.”
“As the show moves forward, the material becomes a little more dramatic and grounded.”
As for what comes next, Marvel has one more WandaVision spinoff planned: a series focused on Vision (Paul Bettany) and reportedly set to bring back Avengers villain Ultron (James Spader). While Schaeffer isn’t involved in that series, she admits to being less than surprised at its existence.
“I think at the time if you had asked me, ‘Can you imagine a Vision spinoff?’ I knew that White Vision would fly away,” she says. “So I think at that time I would've been like, ‘Sure, where does he go? What happens?’ But I never would've anticipated Agatha All Along, and that has been the greatest gift.”
