Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. Vet Side-Eyes Disney CEO’s Slighting of Past Marvel Series

Clark Gregg, the onetime front man for Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. — sorry, Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. — had to raise an eyebrow at a perceived slighting of the first contemporary live-action Marvel series.

In post-morteming the underperformance of recent IP-driven films, Disney CEO Bob Iger said this week at the annual Sun Valley Conference, “In our zeal to basically grow our content significantly to serve mostly our streaming offerings, we ended up taxing our people way beyond — in terms of their time and their focus — where they had been.

“Marvel’s a great example of that,” Iger continued. “They had not been in the TV business at any significant level.” (Emphasis ours.) “Not only did they increase their movie output, but they ended up making a number of television series, and frankly, it diluted focus and attention.”

Gregg, a veteran of ABC’s S.H.I.E.L.D. (and currently a recurring player on Hulu’s How I Met Your Father), quote-tweeted a summary of Iger’s drive-by diss, adding a simple but felt, “Bro…”

Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. was born of the first Avengers movie and was directly impacted by Captain America: The Winter Soldier, yet proceeded to be largely “MCU-adjacent” (as it was produced by the now-defunct Marvel TV shingle, not Marvel Studios itself). And it is far from the only Marvel TV production to precede the Disney+ slate that began with WandaVision and most recently added Secret Invasion.

A year-and-a-half after S.H.I.E.L.D.‘s well-watched September 2013 debut, ABC had Marvel TV’s Marvel’s Agent Carter reporting for duty in January 2015. Netflix then joined the mix with its Marvel TV-produced rollout of Daredevil (April 2015), Jessica Jones (November 2015), Luke Cage (September 2016), Iron Fist (March 2017), the team-up mini The Defenders (August 2017) and The Punisher (November 2017).

Other productions include FX’s Legion (February 2017), ABC’s Marvel’s Inhumans (September 2017), Fox’s The Gifted (October 2017), Hulu’s Marvel’s Runaways (November 2017), Freeform’s Marvel’s Cloak & Dagger (June 2018) and Hulu’s Helstrom (October 2020). And that’s just to name just the live-action MCU-era fare produced by Marvel TV.

All told, that’s 34 seasons of Marvel TV-produced shows that preceded WandaVision‘s January 2021 launch of Disney+’s Marvel Studios-produced, canonical projects.

Which seems significant.