A grieving woman puts a whole town inside a sitcom and lives there, and the show works out which decade she is in before it works out why.
It is the first series Marvel Studios made, and it opens by refusing to look like anything they had made before: black and white, laugh track, a set built to 1950s specification. The premise takes three episodes to become legible and it is worth the wait, because the format is the plot. Every decade the show moves into is Wanda Maximoff holding something together for another week.
The people outside are a government agency with no idea what they are looking at, which is exactly the position the audience is in for the first half.
Show detailsWhere it sits
It is set after Avengers: Endgame and it is the load-bearing context for Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. A viewer who skips it will find that the later film assumes a great deal, most of it emotional rather than factual.
Who is in it
How it connects
Watching these first makes this one land.
Sources
Facts last checked on Sep 7, 2026
Released: January 15, 2021