Jeph Loeb recently sat down with The Wire to discuss the upcoming episodes of Marvels 'Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.'
When asked about how the show would react to the ongoing events of newly released movies Loeb stated
"Carefully." The interviewer then got more specific and asked how the show would respond specifically to the events of Marvel's 'Thor: The Dark World'.
Loeb responded
"Wouldn’t that be fun? … Look, it’s never been done before, which is kind of incredible when you think about how many dramas and how many big movies have been out there. There certainly have been television shows that have been spin-offs from movies, but to have an ongoing, ever-changing mythology which is happening first in the comics, and then in the motion pictures, and the movies are coming out at a rate of two a year — these giant tent-pole films that are reaching a billion dollars at the box office, which means that that mythology is being shared around the world. For us to tell stories that exist with not only similar characters, but often shared characters — beginning with Clark Gregg as Agent Coulson — sometimes we have to be very careful. We have to dance between raindrops. But other times, if we know something is going to happen: Can we use that? Can we make that have an impact on the show? And I think we’ll see some of that in a very interesting way."
"I think folks know that Titus [Welliver], who played Agent Blake, is coming up in episode six [on November 5]. The short answer is yes. But we’ve said from the very beginning, we didn’t do the show in order to make an Easter Egg farm. We want to make sure that if there are going to be characters, things, winks, that come from anywhere, whether it’s the regular mythology of the comics or the Marvel cinematic universe, that it works within the story. That we’re not doing it just to do it. When I look at Cobie [Smulders]’s appearance in the pilot as Maria Hill, it was really important that the person who reintroduced Coulson into the world was Maria Hill. We needed someone who had the gravitas of one of the major characters from the [Avengers] movie being able to say, “There’s a secret, and we’re not going to be able to share that secret with you, but we’re going to take you on the journey with us.” … If you were part of the Marvel family to begin with, it landed for you in a very different way."
"The same kind of thing [happened] when we talked about Sam Jackson being on the show. There were obviously a number of places that we thought Nick Fury would have a big impact on the show, but the more we talked about it, [we wanted] was to get him in very early, so that it would kind of christen the show, legitimize it in its own way. And when Sam generously agreed to do the show, there was a moment where, for people who watch the show, it was the wowest of wow they could imagine."
"But for us as we were standing there on the set the first day, and he said the words “Don’t let FitzSimmons bring on some damned fishtank,” we all just started geeking out, because suddenly we were like “OK, now, now they’re in the family, Director Fury just said ‘FitzSimmons’… so these brand new characters, that didn’t exist in the Marvel Universe, are now firmly entrenched, and it did exactly what we wanted it to do … which was to basically say, these are five new characters who are joining the family."
"On the one hand it’s cool to see Agent Blake, on the other hand we’re introducing new characters in every single show. We will by the end of season one have done 22 hours of S.H.I.E.L.D. stories, we will have told more stories in the Marvel Cinematic Universe than all of the movies combined. So our responsibility becomes greater every day, that we make sure we tell stories that are worthy of the Marvel Universe … And when you’ve got people like Joss Whedon and Jed Whedon and Marissa Tancharoen and Jeffrey Bell at the helm, we don’t have anything to worry about. The scripts just keep coming in, and getting better and better."