Every Marvel Cinematic Universe TV show, ranked
The Marvel Cinematic Universe’s embrace of multiverse shenanigans took the franchise into a new phase, one where in theory, fans no longer need to argue about whether a given Marvel TV show is canon to the MCU. Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige has implied that now, they’re all canon, sorta — any story taking place under the Marvel brand can in theory be considered a multiverse story happening somewhere in the realm of possibility.
That doesn’t change the fact that some Marvel shows — particularly the Disney Plus series beginning with 2021’s WandaVision — are more canon than others. Or that some Marvel shows are better than others. Once Marvel Studios cracked the code that turned many MCU movies into billion-dollar earners, it started applying the same formula to its shows, giving them a now-familiar flavor that’s a far cry from pre-Disney Plus Marvel series, when Marvel Studios was still licensing its characters to other studios and networks. How do other companies’ approaches compare? We put every installment of MCU-integrated TV on the same scale to rank them and find out.
[Ed. note: Not included on this list are pre-MCU Marvel shows like Blade, or Marvel shows that were specifically declared non MCU canon in their day, like the excellent mind game Legion, the X-Men spinoff The Gifted, or the animated series Guardians of the Galaxy. But with Feige’s latest pronouncement, we might have to rethink that, since it’s all technically canon now. Latest update: November 2023, to include Secret Invasion and Loki season 2.]
2020’s Helstromwas the last of the live-action MCU shows released on Hulu before the launch of Disney Plus, and it was canceled after one nearly universally panned season. The show is borderline
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