Agent Carter

TV Series Review

World War II is over. Servicemen are coming home, and their wives and girlfriends—who not only kept the home fires burning but did the homeland’s riveting—are relinquishing their jobs and once again contemplating lives as expert homemakers.

Well, most, maybe. Not Peggy Carter.

A longtime agent for the country’s Strategic Scientific Reserve, Peggy feels more comfortable with a gun in her hand than a spatula. Besides, her own beau—a nice, uniformed chap named Steve Rogers, aka Captain America—never came home from the war. So why not take a shot at a career? It’ll give her a little something to do. Oh, sure, sticking with her job might not change the world, but—

Wait a minute … in Peggy’s case, maybe it will.

Agent Carter, ABC’s 2015 dip into the apparently fathomless Marvel pool, showcases a woman making her own way in a seriously testosterone-stoked world. It’s not just the bad guys giving her a hard time: They, at least, show Peggy some respect by treating her like the tough, competent threat she is. Her co-workers present a more mundane challenge. Sometimes her fellow agents seem to think she’s really best equipped to answer phones and fetch coffee while they do the real work.

Nothing wrong with making coffee, of course. But Peggy knows her true skills and passions lie elsewhere. So she heads out into the wilds of the streets—often without the agency’s knowledge—to right wrongs, foil nefarious plots and excise whatever evil might be afoot.

Help along the way comes from fellow agent Daniel Sousa, who sees that Peggy’s a true-blue friend and, admittedly, a knockout when she wears that red hat of hers. Also from Jarvis, the butler of her good buddy Howard Stark (Iron Man’s dad), who serves as her courteous chauffer, accomplished accomplice and constant comic foil.

Agent Carter is a stylish, sometimes violent romp of a show—a dramatic series with all the action and fun of a 1940s serial, but with modern sensibilities and 21st-century polish (read: more close-ups of the choreographed conflicts). While Marvel’s movies are all about high-flying muscular dudes in tights, and TV’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. has become a gritty, almost Lost-flavored actioner, Agent Carter is a retro cloak-and-dagger humdinger that, at least early on, seems to carry with it at least a whiff of innocence from its 1940s-era setting.

Not that that sort of thing would ever stop Peggy from using her womanly wiles to make headway in her male-centric corner of the superhero universe—and that can mean wearing provocative outfits and smooching the occasional bad guy. And some of her chauvinistic cohorts make lewd comments.

That’s too bad. What isn’t is Peggy’s determination to, despite her lack of superpowers, do the right thing day after day, saving the world one secret mission at a time. And even if her co-workers don’t appreciate what a serious force she is, we’re meant to make up for it.