One of the weirder little gags from Marvel's various TV ambitions over the last few years played out, quite publicly, over several months stretching forward from 2021, when Disney announced it was making a TV series based on Kathryn Hahn's WandaVision character Agatha Harkness. Originally announced as the fairly innocuous Agatha: House Of Harkness (a name that's actually been used for at least two online Marvel comics in subsequent years), the show seemed to suddenly shift titles in 2022, appearing as Coven Of Chaos—and then Darkhold Diaries not much longer afterward. (At one point, they apparently floated one that was a Lion, The Witch, And The Wardrobe pun, but it was quickly deleted from Disney's social media.) Eventually, the show just came out and announced that, yeah, it's called Agatha All Along, just as everyone sort of suspected; the bit was clearly meant as a running joke about the character's deceptive nature, which can apparently extend even to fucking with the show's own search engine results.
Executive producer Mary Livanos gave an interview this week to THR, discussing the upcoming series, which debuts on Disney+ with its first two episodes (of nine) on September 18. Among other things, Livanos revealed that the title gag, which went on for a long time, if you'll recall, was the brainchild of WandaVision and Agatha All Along mastermind Jac Scheaffer, who enlisted both the show's cast and its writers to keep the odd little gag going. "Hats off to Jac Schaeffer on that one, and our incredible writers’ room," Livanos said, reminiscing about "the best day of brainstorming I think we’ve ever had, figuring out all those titles." Livanos added that "It was a real blast to release crazier and crazier ones as the production went on, and our cast was so game, too." (At one point, for instance, star Aubrey Plaza appeared in a photo showing a directors' chair labeled with one of the fake names.) "The nature of the stunt felt very Agatha, very liar. So it felt very on theme, and it was fun to do."
Part of our fascination with this whole thing, admittedly, is that it's such a "Wouldn't it be fun if…?" sort of concept, the kind of thing that gets immediately shot down when it's pointed out that, say, it's going to make your very expensive TV project weirdly hard for people to keep track of. Still, we might have said something similar about "exploring superhero trauma through the lens of an old rerun of The Dick Van Dyke Show," and WandaVision remains one of the sole inarguable bright points of the Disney+ Marvel shows, so maybe we just need to assume Schaeffer knows what she's doing with stuff like this.
