Agatha All Along (2024) Review

A witch stripped of her power is living inside a delusion, is snapped out of it by a teenager who wants something from her, and assembles a coven to walk a road that may not exist.

The 1 is about structure instead of craft. There is real production value here, a committed cast and a genuinely good song, and none of that addresses the problem that the series has no reason to exist beyond a character having been popular.

The Witches’ Road is the clearest symptom. A quest with a new obstacle each week, no cumulative pressure, and a destination the show keeps refusing to define until the mechanism is revealed as something other than what it claimed.

A Scene-Stealer Cannot Be the Whole Scene

Agatha worked in WandaVision because of what she was doing to somebody else. She was a neighbour with a hidden agenda, present in small doses, and her scenes were good because the audience was watching a performance inside a performance.

Promoted to protagonist, she loses both conditions at once. There is nobody for her to be secretly manipulating, because everybody in the coven knows what she is, and there is no restraint on the screen time, because it is her show.

Kathryn Hahn is not the problem and she cannot fix it. She plays contempt, exhaustion and appetite with real precision, and the character has no want the audience can hold beyond getting her power back, which is a goal instead of a motive.

The series recognizes this late and supplies a backstory about a son, which arrives in the seventh episode and is asked to retroactively supply the interior life the previous six were missing.

That episode is also the best in the season, which is the problem. A woman who has spent centuries taking power from covens is shown doing it once, to people who trusted her, for a reason, and everything she does in the six episodes before it would have meant something had the audience known.

The Road Has No Pressure

Each episode presents a trial, the coven attempts it, somebody fails, and the group proceeds. The structure repeats without escalation.

Nothing accumulates because nothing carries forward. A trial that is survived costs the characters no resource they need later, and the deaths that occur do not change what remains possible for the group.

The show also withholds the nature of the road for too long. Ambiguity works when the reader can see the shape of the question, and here the audience is asked to invest in a journey without knowing what arrival would mean.

When the mechanism is revealed the retroactive effect is deflating. The road was not what it appeared, which converts six episodes of trials into something closer to a staged exercise, and staged exercises have no stakes by definition.

Compare it to the first season of Loki, which established its rules in the opening hour and obeyed them for six. Rules stated early let an audience calculate risk. Rules withheld until the end mean the audience has spent the whole work unable to assess anything they were watching.

The Coven Is Underwritten

Six women assemble and the series gives two of them enough material to be people.

Patti LuPone’s Lilia is the best of them, a diviner who experiences her own life out of order, and the episode built on that idea is the only hour with a genuinely interesting structure in it.

Debra Jo Rupp, Ali Ahn and Sasheer Zamata are all capable performers given single traits and a function in a trial. The series keeps introducing what each of them is afraid of and then resolving it in the same episode.

Aubrey Plaza’s Rio is the exception and the show is coy about her for too long. A former lover who turns out to be something else entirely is a good idea delivered so late that the relationship it is meant to complicate has barely been established.

Plaza is doing something specific with the part and it deserves a better vehicle. She plays somebody who has known Agatha for centuries, finds her tiresome and cannot leave, which is a recognizable kind of relationship and the only one in the series with any history behind it.

The Teen Is the Withheld Card

Joe Locke plays a boy who cannot say his own name, follows Agatha onto the road, and is revealed late to be somebody the audience was meant to have guessed.

The withholding is the series’ central miscalculation. A character defined by a secret the show refuses to state has no interior life until the statement arrives, so he spends most of the run as a device with an expression.

Locke is good in the material he is finally given, and the last two episodes contain the relationship the series should have been about. A boy who needs a mother figure and a woman who destroyed the last person who needed that from her.

That is a genuine idea and it arrives with ninety minutes left in a nine-episode season, after six hours of trials that did nothing to establish it.

The series was also announced as a single season with no continuation planned, which makes the structural choice harder to defend. A show that knows it has nine episodes and no more has no reason to hold its premise back until the seventh.

What Works

The Ballad of the Witches’ Road is a real piece of songwriting, repeated across the season in different arrangements, and it is the most memorable thing the franchise produced in Phase 5.

The practical effects are also a genuine choice. The road, the houses and several of the trials are physically built, and after a phase defined by digital environments the difference is immediately visible.

The first episode is a good half hour. A television detective procedural pastiche, committed to in the same way WandaVision committed to its sitcoms, and the series abandons the device once it has served an introduction.

There is a version of this show that keeps doing that. Each episode a different genre, the way the first one is a Scandinavian-style murder investigation, with the delusion breaking down a little more each time. The series does it once, well, and then becomes a fantasy quest with no format at all.

The 1 registers a show with those elements in it and no reason to be nine episodes long. Everything that works here is texture, and texture cannot substitute for a protagonist with a want and a structure with pressure.

It is also the clearest case on this page of the phase’s defining habit. A character was popular, so a series was commissioned, and the series was built around the popularity instead of around a story somebody needed to tell. Nine hours later the best idea in the whole thing turns out to be a mother and a son, introduced for the first time in the seventh episode.

Should you watch Agatha All Along?

Watch the first episode and the Lilia episode. There is a good ninety minutes in here about a woman who destroys everybody who needs her, and it is distributed across nine hours of a quest that turns out not to have been a quest.

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