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‘WandaVision’ Is the Quintessential Quarantine Show
Marvel’s latest hit is relentlessly overhyped, but it’s perfect for our Covid reality
Just before the one-year anniversary of Covid-19, I started watching It’s a Sin. The widely acclaimed miniseries, by Queer as Folk creator and former Doctor Who showrunner Russell T. Davies, is about young men living through the AIDS crisis in the 1980s. I only ever had a child’s-eye view of those years: I volunteered at the local AIDS hospice in middle school and sat through school PSAs about how one mistake could kill you, but I never shared the terror or grief of adult gay men, who were losing boyfriends and friends and mentors in massive numbers. It turns out that immersing yourself in that perspective as an adult, during a different pandemic, is overwhelming.
With It’s a Sin, Davies brilliantly weaponizes the tropes of the twentysomething coming-of-age comedy, putting us at our ease with this ragtag family of kooky kids just before sucker-punching us with their horrible deaths: “What no one will remember is how fun it was,” says one man on his deathbed. It’s hard to calm down after an episode in which the shyest and sweetest character, who we thought was a virgin, dies in hideous suffering as the result of his one and only sexual experience. So, in an effort to settle, I tend to follow each episode with something lighter. I watch It’s a Sin, and then I watch WandaVision.
The story follows Wanda, an all-powerful witch who has retreated into her own personal happy place — old sitcoms — after the deaths of her brother and husband. Using her powers to create an alternate reality, Wanda is able to bring both men back to life. Each episode, up to a point, is a recreation of the sitcom style of a certain decade: A black-and-white 1950s domestic farce, an ’00s mockumentary, etc. It all makes for maybe the quintessential quarantine watch.
The series would be clever in any year. The evolving TV representation of sitcom wives — the women getting increasingly more independent, their marriages becoming increasingly less idealized — is mirrored, in each episode, by Wanda’s growing acknowledgment of her own power and the corresponding disintegration of her fantasy marriage. Kathryn Hahn turns in an endlessly meme-worthy…
