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

‘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.

Anyway, it stars Paul Bettany as the android Vision and Elizabeth Olsen as his telekinetic wife Wanda Maximoff (aka Scarlet Witch). For reasons we have yet to learn — an air of mystery and foreboding looms over the early episodes; clearly there is going to be a Big Reveal — they have come back to life after their big-screen deaths and been transported to a cosy idyll called Westview in 1950s suburban America, where all may be not as it seems.

My immediate reaction was that it’s a charming, exquisitely done, pointless confection. Huge efforts have gone into recreating, with near-perfection, the mood, tone, decor, the social mores and arch, homely, dated humour of series such as The Dick Van Dyke Show and I Love Lucy.

So, in the first episode, we have Vision and Wanda playing out a farce in which the difficult boss and his wife are coming to dinner and they have to impress or Vision will be denied promotion at the computer company where handily (because he’s very good at it) he has found a job.