James Delingpole James Delingpole

Like trying to understand some obscure but fashionable meme: WandaVision reviewed

Plus: Sky Atlantic’s A Discovery of Witches inexcusably reduces one of England’s greatest gay roisterers to a whiny milksop

That’s chemistry: Elizabeth Olsen as Wanda Maximoff and Paul Bettany as Vision in WandaVision 
issue 23 January 2021

‘What the world needs now is a black and white pastiche of classic 1950s and 1960s sitcoms reviving two Marvel superhero characters who were last seen getting killed in Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame,’ said… well, I was about to say: ‘said no one ever’. But clearly someone did, because this is what we’ve now got on Disney+: a bizarro series called WandaVision.

I feel terribly out of the loop for not quite getting it. But possibly I’m not the target audience. For a start, I haven’t seen either of those Avengers movies; nor am I sufficiently familiar with the nuances of the Marvel comics universe to get all the frequent knowing references, such as the pastiche adverts for toasters produced by Stark Industries. Watching it is a bit like trying to understand some typically obscure but fashionable meme. You would ask a teenager to explain — but you know you’d only get a contemptuous sigh and an eye-roll.

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