Deadline has good news and eh news from the field of new television in 2014: their sources say that a Peggy Carter series is moving along towards being greenlit, but that it might show up as a bridge between a two part second season of Agents of SHIELD.
This is all according to Deadline’s sources, not official announcements, so take it with a grain of salt, but here’s what they say:
Last year, the company went into Fort Knox mode on its Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. pilot, which was kept under lock and key. They took that a notch further this year with Agent Carter. Because there is a prototype — the project is inspired by a one shot, which was featured on the Blu-ray release of Iron Man 3 — word has been that it would forgo a pilot and go straight to series. The script was finished more than three months ago (“the script is great,” ABC’s Paul Lee said back in January), the option on one-shot’s star Hayley Atwell came up and was extended, but the green light never came. Now there is talk that a pickup for Agent Carter may come along with a renewal for Marvel’s freshman Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., with the new series possibly serving as a bridge between the fall and spring portions of S.H.I.E.L.D.
This all jives with what Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely (writers of both Captain America movies and the Agent Carter pilot) said about the show’s status last month. Agent Carter would be a limited series of thirteen episodes, good for slipping into the winter hiatus of another series. Of course, there may be more to talk about in the assumption that Agents of SHIELD will get a second season. Despite the fact that they were airing a highly anticipated tie in to a movie with #1 box office cred, last week’s “Turn, Turn, Turn” was a series low for ratings, which have steadily declined from nearly the first episode of the show.
If Agents of SHIELD doesn’t pull itself out of the slump, now that its actually free of the need to keep major revelations in check so as not to intrude on its big brother Captain America: The Winter Soldier, it’s hard to see a renewal order as anything other than an acknowledgement, by Disney, that the show is what many fans feared: an hour-long commercial for the Marvel movie universe.
Either way, we’re still getting Cobie Smulders in the season finale (who we last saw applying for a job with Stark Industries), so that will be nice.
(story via Deadline, Screenrant, TV Line.)
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