Patti LuPone has no filter. She also has neither the time nor the need for BS. So when she says Agatha All Along showrunner Jac Schaeffer told her the show won’t have a second season, we know the Broadway legend is telling the truth. Normally that kind of news would bum us out because we loved the series, but not this time. It means Schaeffer is free to do something unique on television. Just like Agatha All Along served as a sequel to her first MCU series WandaVision, Schaeffer can now make the first-ever TV trilogy with a show focused on Wiccan. And considering what we know about both his comics and MCU story, the series could make this Harkness Trilogy a full, satisfying circle.
“I don’t do second seasons.” That’s what Patti LuPone said Jac Schaeffer told her about potentially returning to Agatha All Along. Schaeffer also told LuPone she passed on doing more WandaVision, even though Marvel Studios wanted another season. Schaeffer said she only does “one-offs” because “there’s too much to write.” That doesn’t mean she has to say goodbye to her MCU witches, though. She certainly didn’t after WandaVision.
Schaeffer followed up her first Disney+ MCU series with a de facto sequel that worked as its own standalone show. Agatha All Along had direct, meaningful connections to WandaVision, but it featured an a different main character, tone, and purpose. That kind of sequel series is what Agatha All Along set up in its final moments. The show ended with Ghost Agatha going off with Billy Maximoff to find his missing brother Tommy. Whatever happens next to the MCU’s witches is about Billy, not Agatha, just as whatever happened to Agatha after the Hex fell was about her and not Wanda.
That’s exactly the show Schaeffer should make next. A Wiccan series would tie into its predecessors in meaningful ways yet it could also be something new. It would be the third part of an MCU Harkness Trilogy. Each installment would serve itself and be part of a bigger cohesive story, like a classic movie trilogy.
TV spinoffs are not like movie sequels. Cheers and Frasier are two of the best sitcoms ever, but no one thinks of Frasier as a sequel. It was a spinoff. (The recently cancelled Frasier reboot/sequel was even less connected to Cheers.) Even when a series leads to multiple spinoffs as part of a larger universe, like The Walking Dead, the new shows aren’t operating together the way a cohesive film trilogy does. The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Rhoda, and Lou Grant are not bound together the way A New Hope, The Empire Strikes Back, and Return of the Jedi are. Even anthology series that exist in the same universe and timeline and have direct connections don’t work that way. True Detective has through lines, but it is not equivalent to The Dark Knight trilogy.
TV can deliver shared cinematic worlds like the Arrowverse, Star Trek, and The Defenders, but those aren’t created or connect the way film series do. No one would equate those shows with movie series like Back to the Future or The Matrix. Mostly because it’s never really been something anyone could do. TV’s traditional episodic structure and typical sandbox-style storytelling makes that all but impossible. The modern television format of fewer episodes with a tighter, season-long major arc doesn’t easily lend itself to recreating the kind of connected stories you can tell with a film series, either. You can focus on a different major story every season, the way shows like Mad Men or The Wire did, but those are still self-contained shows. They would never be confused with a film trilogy and they shouldn’t be.
The only person that has done something similar to Schaeffer on TV is what Vince Gilligan did with Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul. His shows were intimately connected and interwoven, but told very different stories following very different lead characters in a very different manner. (Though not nearly as different as WandaVision and Agatha All Along told theirs.) But even Gilligan didn’t attempt a third show. The closest he came was the underwhelming El Camino sequel, a movie whose existence makes a compelling case against applying this film format to TV.
Schaeffer’s big advantage is the length of Disney+ MCU shows. WandaVision and Agatha All Along run 18 episodes combined. Breaking Bad alone had 62. With dramatically fewer episodes to worry about Schaeffer can tell a tighter, more movie-like story with each of her shows. She did exactly that with both WandaVision and Agatha All Along. Now she can do so with her next main character, Billy Maximoff. Agatha All Along ended by setting up the beginning of his story, where him and his goals are the focus. His brother Tommy found a body just like Billy did when the Hex collapsed. Billy, with the help of ghost Agatha, is now going to go off and find him, a story set up at the end of both WandaVision and Agatha All Along. It’s also the type of journey his comic counterpart is very familiar with.
As viewers learned, Wiccan is an immensely powerful witch. And despite never getting his own standalone series (him and his boyfriend Hulkling have co-headlined a short run), he’s been a major figure in some important Marvel Comics storylines. One of those included doing the very thing his onscreen counterpart is setting out to do: look for a missing family member. Only instead of his brother, comics Wiccan went looking for his powerful mom, the Scarlet Witch. She’s a major character who just so happens to be missing in the MCU right now.
A Disney+ Wiccan series, telling its own story in its own way with its own lead character, just as Agatha All Along did, could also see Billy (and possibly Tommy) looking for their mother. And that would bring Schaeffer’s Harkness Trilogy full circle, the fitting ending for any multi-part series. It began with Wanda creating the Hex and Agatha coming to find her. Now instead of working against a Maximoff witch, Agatha can support the Scarlet Witch’s children to find the woman who binds all them and their stories together. (Which would also provide a bonus of servicing the MCU at large.)
Jac Schaeffer doesn’t want to do another season of WandaVision or Agatha All Along. Yet she left major questions about her witches unanswered, as though she’s not done with them yet. We hope she’s not. And we hope she continues telling her magical story in a way that would be unlike anything that’s ever been done on TV before. She can help a studio that built an empire adapting the best concepts of television serialization for movies do the opposite. Marvel could bring the best of movie serialization to television. And, with apologies to the great Patti LuPone, that would be even better than a second season of any TV show.
Mikey Walsh is a staff writer at Nerdist willing to walk the Witches’ Road. You can follow him on Bluesky at @burgermike. And also anywhere someone is ranking the Targaryen kings.
