Agatha All Along episode 1 review: campy fun, a little long

We went into the first episode of Agatha All Along without much excitement, and we came out of it liking it. It's weird, but we didn't hate it, and we thought it was good. Our one real complaint is that it felt a little long.

Agatha All Along (2024) is the series starring Kathryn Hahn as Agatha Harkness. It picks up with her where WandaVision left her, after Wanda trapped her in her own mind at the end of that show. That was such a creepy ending.

Agatha Harkness is stuck inside a crime show

The opening threw us at first. Agatha shows up as a detective, looking bored, and the whole thing has an older look that reminded us of WandaVision. Once we worked out that she's still stuck, now playing a detective in a crime show, it made much more sense.

The lines are campy, and we think that works. The show leans into police tropes: the annoying gum chewing in the library, the idea that a lady cop can't be good at her job and have a healthy personal life. They're throwing in every trope from a police show, and we loved that. A stolen library book turns out to be the Darkhold, which we remember from WandaVision. We wondered if Agatha might go after it in the show. The last place we saw it was in Doctor Strange.

Waking up after three years, without her powers

When Agatha finally wakes, she peels off each era's look, ending on a black and white version. She learns she's been there about three years, with a neighbor bringing groceries and assuming she'd caught the true crime bug. We also learned she'd been listening to true crime podcasts.

Then she discovers her powers are gone. Wanda took every bit of power she had and left her with household appliances, and we don't blame Wanda for that. It also turns out the boy from the arrest scene is tied up in a closet, so that arrest was maybe more of a kidnapping. Poor guy. We wanted someone to untie him.

An attack on Agatha and the Salem's Seven tease

Agatha sees Wanda, and remembering that she was crushed by the mountain in Doctor Strange made that make more sense to us. Later, someone who's back with power tries to kill Agatha with what we thought was a cool looking knife. Agatha is only vulnerable physically, and there's blood on her hand.

The mention of others who want Agatha dead, with the Salem's Seven named as the worst of them, is where we started to get interested.

Our verdict on the Agatha All Along premiere

We weren't jumping up and down to watch the next episode, but we could watch it. We liked the stylized take on the detective show at the beginning, because it made sense. Our one negative is that it went a little long, and maybe that's why the show opened with two episodes, to move the story forward. Still, we liked it.