During the Toronto International Film Festival, where the filmmaker was promoting his indie take on Shakespeare's Much Ado about Nothing, which Lionsgate recently acquired, Joss Whedon discussed with MTV News his prospective Marvel TV series, S.H.I.E.L.D.. Verifying that the show will have new characters, watch the video below; as well a bit from The Avengers' Mark Ruffalo discussing a stab at another solo Hulk movie.
UPDATE: In a separate interview with the New York Times, Joss Whedon offered a bit more about the show.
“It's trucking right along. I’m writing it with Jed Whedon and Maurissa Tancharoen, my brother and sister-in-law who worked on “Dollhouse” with me. And we’re planning to shoot it just as soon as we can get it up and running. It’s an ensemble show, so we’ve gotta find the right cast. We found a way to structure it so that what we’re dealing with are agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. who are the humans in a superhero world and how they deal with that and how it makes them vulnerable.”
“It's new characters. It needs to be its own thing. It needs to be adjacent [to the MCU] but you don't want to do a show where you're constantly going, 'Iron Man just left, but he was totally here a minute ago.' You want them to do their own thing. Well, what does S.H.I.E.L.D. have that the other superheroes don't? And that, to me, is that they're not superheroes. But they live in that universe. Even though they're a big organization, that [lack of powers] makes them underdogs, and that's interesting to me.”