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Marvel's Agent Carter Has Director Coulson's Stamp of Approval

Abigail Raney writes,

"I just want to say that I've seen their pilot, and it's insane. It's the best pilot I've ever seen." This is what Clark Gregg has to say when he briefly crashes our interview with Agent Carter star Hayley Atwell. Is there a better recommendation to have than high praise from the newly appointed director of S.H.I.E.L.D.? Not in the Marvel Universe, I'd wager.

Beyond getting the thumbs of from the director, I got a few other insights from Atwell, showrunners Tara Butters and Michele Fazekas, executive producer Jeph Loeb, and executive producers and writers of the pilot Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely. Check out some of the highlights below.

On the series getting a first season order:

Fazekas: It's incredible to be involved in Marvel's first foray into a single female lead show.

Atwell: It was a dream come true, really, because I'd had such a great experience doing the first two films, and loved working with the Marvel crew and all the filmmakers. So this was just this wonderful extension, to be able to revisit something that was a very joyous memory for me.

On the series' limited run:

McFeely: We lobbied for a short series, because we would rather do something like the cable model, which is sort, not a case of the week sort of thing, but one longer story that takes as few episodes as possible.

Markus: Keeping it tight like that allows us to tell a single adventure.

McFeely: And I think it makes it special. If it didn't get renewed and it was just eight episodes, we'd have hopefully eight damn good episodes you put in a DVD, you put on your shelf, and it's this special little thing.

Atwell: I'm so committed to Peggy Carter that I would have done it if it had gone on for 50 episodes.

On the historical setting of the series and its challenges:

Markus: Sometimes the biggest challenge is not writing cliched 1945 dialogue, like "Hey, sugar."

McFeely: We're going to keep the sugars to a minimum.

Markus: Everything we know about that pretty much comes from old movies…. How do we get past that and make them people?

McFeely: It'll be "Marvel's version of the 40s… Probably means no one's smoking, that probably means we're more integrated than we were.

So, family friendly?

McFeely: Kind of, although we're nine o'clock…

Markus: We promise one family un-friendly moment per episode.

On other female characters in the series, especially the female baddie(s) hinted at on the Marvel panel:

McFeely: If you saw the short, the short was basically Peggy Carter against a male-dominated workforce. That's certainly part of the story. But it turns out there were at least two million women that lived in New York in 1946, so we're going to find a few of them.

Markus: It almost seems like there's something still sort of reductive toward women if you only have a woman good character, but they don't get to be bad.

On whether we'll get any glimpses into Peggy Carter's past:

Fazekas: We certainly have talked about what her back story is, and how that influenced who she is now, so that is something that we would get into at some point. With eight episodes, you can't get into everything right away, but we've definitely talked – and we talked with with Markus and McFeely, who wrote the pilot and who wrote the Captain America movies. We talked about who she was, and how that made her into the woman she is today.

On the way Agent Carter fits into what we have seen (and will see) on S.H.I.E.L.D.:

Loeb: We have a unique opportunity in that we're going to have a second series, and in that second series, we're going to be able to explore how SHIELD came together in the first place. The first SHIELD agent, Peggy Carter, is going to be able to show us not only the world, but the why. And so there's a way to sort of bounce back and forth – without it actually having to bounce back and forth.

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