Announced at San Diego Comic-Con, Marvel fan-favorite, Agents of SHIELD, will come to an end after its upcoming seventh season.
Marvel TV boss Jeph Loeb had this to say about wrapping things up:
“When you know that’s what you’re doing, you can take greater risks, of life and death. Those kinds of decisions suddenly now are real on the table because you’re not playing how do we undo this when we get to the next season. You’re playing that this is going to be the end of the story.”
Agents of SHIELD was presented in Hall H on Friday with Loeb joining Clark Gregg along with fellow cast members Ming-Na Wen, Chloe Bennet, Elizabeth Henstridge, Iain De Caestecker, Henry Simmons, Natalia Cordova-Buckley and Jeff Ward. The crew has been a mainstay at Comic-Con since the launch of the series.
With a 2013 premiere date, the show is one of the oldest still airing new episodes on ABC; only one other drama program launched earlier (Grey’s Anatomy, which began in 2005). The rest are more recent network additions. Loeb wouldn’t really give any proper hints, but it sounds like they have some kind of grand plan that plays off of whatever happens at the end of season six. He also says the finale will be “incredibly emotional” and hints that it will leave the door open in some way for the S.H.I.E.L.D. gang to continue having adventures—though he does says that “every great Marvel story ends to be continued.”
Efforts by Marvel and ABC to expand the SHIELD universe have mostly been a miss. Captain America TV spinoff Agent Carter — starring Hayley Atwell reprising her feature role — was ordered to series and lasted only two seasons despite glowing reviews (it had subpar ratings). Marvel and ABC’s attempts to develop other projects — including a SHIELD spinoff — failed after multiple attempts following Imax-backed Inhumans. The latter drama, produced in partnership with Imax, was canceled after one critically panned season. It had launched in select movie theaters in a bid to bring in the MCU audience.
Agents of SHIELD, co-created by Joss and Jed Whedon and Maurissa Tancharoen, moved to Friday during season five and continues to air on the typically little-watched night — and will remain there in its current sixth season this summer. With live-plus-7 Nielsen lifts, it averages just a 1.2 rating among adults 18-49, shy of 4 million viewers. Still, the show remains an international draw, and the fact that it is produced in house by corporate siblings ABC Studios and Marvel Television has always worked in its favor. Even though the series has mostly been on the bubble since it started, Agents of SHIELD was Marvel’s first venture into live-action primetime scripted programming and helped usher in a new era of comic book TV shows for the Disney-owned media giant.
