VARIETY: ‘WandaVision,’ created by Jac Schaeffer and starring returning Avengers Paul Bettany (Vision) and Elizabeth Olsen (Wanda Maximoff), is by far the strangest addition to the MCU. Warning, spoilers ahead for the new series.

Debuting on Jan. 15 on Disney Plus, this “Twilight Zone” channeling mini-series jumps from decade to decade, with the stars seemingly trapped inside their own (period-appropriate) sitcoms. Each episode is a new decade, and a new collection of TV tropes for audiences to wade through.

In a press conference on Sunday moderated by Jaleel White of “Family Matters” fame, a perfect nod to the many great sitcoms of the past “WandaVision” took inspiration from, the show’s stars and creators answered burning questions, including how Hydra factors into the show and which sitcoms were used for inspiration. Schaeffer, Bettany, Olsen, director Matt Shakman, Kathryn Hahn, Teyonah Parris and President of Marvel Studios Kevin Feige were all in attendance. Read on to find out everything we know so far about the series.

‘WandaVision’ was taped in front of a live studio audience

To add that authentic sitcom feel, the first episode of “WandaVision” (set in the 1950s) was filmed in front of a live studio audience. Though it used to be the norm back in the day — as White pointed out, every episode of “Family Matters” was taped live — the method took Olsen a little getting used to. “It was so nerve-wracking,” Olsen said. “There was a lot of adrenaline, there were a lot of quick changes, and it totally confused my brain… The idea of not playing to an audience, but feeding off an audience and having a camera. I was really grateful when we added the fourth wall.”

Meeting with Dick Van Dyke and sitcom boot camp

In order to remain as authentic as possible, director Shakman and Feige met with sitcom great Dick Van Dyke, who shared his wisdom. “I remember Kevin and I had this amazing lunch with Dick Van Dyke that remains one of the great afternoons of my life. And we asked him, ‘What was the governing principle behind ‘The Dick Van Dyke Show’? Why did it work so well?’ And he said, ‘If it couldn’t happen in real life, it can’t happen on the show,’” Shakman said.

Other aspects of production were also important to the show’s authenticity, such as the production design, cinematography and costumes. But more than anything, Shakman said that he and the cast did research by watching as many sitcoms as they could throughout the decades.

“We watched a ton of old television episodes and talked about how comedy changes because it really does. The approach to comedy in the ’50s, ’60s, ’70s is really different. And as Lizzie said, doing it in front of this live studio audience, which is this quasi-theater-TV thing, it really adds to it,” Shakman said. “Lucille Ball, ‘I Love Lucy,’ Dick Van Dyke – you can feel the energy of that theatrical performance, working with the audience. And then when you get into ’60s shows like “Bewitched” or “I Dream of Jeannie,” it is a fourth wall and all of a sudden, it’s more like doing a movie these days and the laugh track is canned and brought in, which changes the energy, the approach, the style, everything.”

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Marvel’s first series for Disney+ is part drama, part homage to vintage sitcoms, following the misfit heroes played by Elizabeth Olsen and Paul Bettany to some weird places.

NY TIMES: In the time they have spent playing Marvel heroes together, Elizabeth Olsen and Paul Bettany have gotten extremely comfortable with each other. Not even a little misdirected mucus during the making of their new Disney+ series, “WandaVision” — an incident they affectionately describe as “Snotgate” — flustered them for long.

It occurred when their characters — a woman enhanced with psychic powers named Wanda Maximoff (Olsen) and a synthetic android called Vision (Bettany) — shared a kiss in, especially cold weather. And some disagreements remain about the specifics of how it transpired.

“Paul was not in a good mood for me to make a joke about his snot,” Olsen said in a video interview with Bettany last month. “It was my first time ever seeing him get truly defensive about anything.”

Here, Bettany leaned into his camera and replied, sotto voce: “It was her snot. Anyway.”

They agreed that their differences were quickly settled, and now they can laugh about it. “It was over as quickly as it happened,” Bettany said.

Such are the perils of playing a troubled woman and a sophisticated robot who have fallen in love with each other — characters who first met in the 2015 Marvel blockbuster “Avengers: Age of Ultron,” returned for several sequels and now get the chance to carry their own television series when “WandaVision” makes its debut on Jan. 15.

Like its main characters, “WandaVision” is, well, weird. It’s not strictly an action-packed spectacle in the manner of hit movies like “Avengers: Endgame” — it’s a hybrid of drama and comedy that pays faithful homage to vintage sitcoms like “The Dick Van Dyke Show,” “Bewitched” and “Family Ties.”

Now, through circumstances beyond anyone’s control, “WandaVision” has to carry even more weight. When the pandemic prompted Marvel to reshuffle its release calendar, “WandaVision” became the studio’s first attempt to bring the superhero soap opera of the Marvel Cinematic Universe to an original Disney+ series, in hopes that it will do for its comic-book characters what “The Mandalorian” has done for “Star Wars,” another Disney-owned fantasy franchise.

These are unexpectedly high stakes but, like the love-struck misfits they play, the stars of “WandaVision” see them as reasons to be more understanding of each other, snot and all.

As Olsen explained: “It’s daunting to take these movie-theater characters and put them on a small screen. There’s a lot of firsts that are a little scary as an actor.”

Bettany agreed. “We need to feel safe with each other,” he added, “to do the thing we’re doing.”

Both actors entered the Marvel family in unusual ways. Bettany, a star of films like “A Beautiful Mind” and “Margin Call,” was cast in the first M.C.U. movie, “Iron Man,” to play the voice of Tony Stark’s artificial intelligence system, J.A.R.V.I.S.

“I would turn up for one day’s work and solve everyone’s problems,” Bettany said. “I could go, ‘The bad guys are coming, sir!’ And then they would give me a bag of money, and I would go home. It was lovely.”

Bettany was upgraded to an onscreen role for “Age of Ultron,” which also introduced Olsen (“Martha Marcy May Marlene”) as Wanda. At that time, Olsen said: “I was getting typecast as emotionally struggling young women in small genre films. They were like, let’s put her in a bigger genre film and make her the mentally unhealthy struggling hero.”

Though the spotlight shone brighter on co-stars like Chris Evans and Robert Downey Jr., Bettany and Olsen bonded over the strangeness of their enterprise, like a behind-the-scenes debate they observed over whether Vision should have android genitalia. (Mercifully, the answer was no.)

As they went onto films like “Captain America: Civil War,” they found that they shared an appreciation for diligence and preparedness, even on a hectic Marvel set.

At one point on that film, Olsen said, “I asked Paul if he wanted to run lines with me for the next week. And he had his lines memorized for next week. I was like, this is going to be a great working relationship.”

But Vision was seemingly killed in “Avengers: Infinity War,” and the following year, “Endgame” concluded the narrative arcs of major heroes like Iron Man and Captain America.

Marvel was exploring storylines for its next wave of movies when Disney introduced its Disney+ streaming service, with the expectation that Marvel would also provide original content for it.

Kevin Feige, the Marvel Studios president, said that a Disney+ series offered the opportunity to flesh out the relationship between Wanda and Vision that had been only hinted at in the movies.

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EMPIRE – Ever since her introduction in the post-credits sequence of Captain America: The Winter Soldier, the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s Wanda Maximoff has always been an ensemble player in its subsequent superhero smackdowns, realigning her allegiances in Age Of Ultron, joining the airport fray in Civil War, and making sure Thanos knew exactly what she was capable of in the finale of Endgame. But she’s never been centre stage before, until now. In WandaVision, the first of the MCU’s upcoming run of Disney+ limited series which tie directly into the long-running movie franchise, she’s the star of the show, paired up once again with Paul Bettany’s Vision for a mind-bending sitcom-inspired comic book mystery.

Elizabeth Olsen’s character, aka Scarlet Witch, might have proved she was more powerful than we were ever aware of at the end of Endgame, but audiences are about to understand her a whole lot better – including what exactly she can do with those Mind Stone-imbued powers. “If you look at the Infinity Saga, I don’t think any single person has gone through more pain and trauma than Wanda Maximoff. And no character seems to be as powerful as Wanda Maximoff. And no character has a power-set that is as ill-defined and unexplored as Wanda Maximoff,” MCU boss Kevin Feige tells Empire. “So it seemed exploring that would be worthwhile post-Endgame. Who else is aware of that power? Where did it come from? Did the Mind Stone unlock it?”

The natural vehicle to explore that power-set? A six-episode romp through sitcom history, with Wanda experiencing a reality that sees her somehow living the American Dream with her robo-beau – despite the fact that we saw him definitively cark it in Infinity War. The results should be like nothing Marvel – or anyone else, for that matter – has done before, bringing superhero set-pieces and psychological character study to an unabashed love-letter to classic domestic situation comedies. “I loved TV, and watched far too much The Dick Van Dyke Show and I Love Lucy and Bewitched and everything,” Feige says of his viewing habits as a kid. And while the bits we’ve seen of WandaVision so far tease homages to old black-and-white series, it has plenty more up its sleeve. “We go up to the Modern Family and The Office style,” Feige reveals. “The talk-to-the-camera, shaky-camera, documentary style.”

Scarlet Witch, one of comics’ most powerful and complex characters, is arguably the most underserved Avenger in all of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. WandaVision, Marvel Studios’ upcoming streaming series for Disney+, aims to change all that.

The mutant offspring of Magneto in the comics, an “enhanced” member of Earth’s Mightiest Heroes in the MCU, Wanda Maximoff is an exceptionally complicated, broken-not-sprained character in any medium. No better was this explored than in one of Marvel’s greatest stories, the game-changing and tragic House of M, a 2005 event comic from writer Brian Michael Bendis and artist Olivier Coipel in which Wanda reshaped all of reality after the loss of her children. In her new world, mutants reigned supreme, while normal humans were second-class citizens.

Now that the X-Men are back under Marvel Studios’ roof, Wanda and the MCU seem primed to mine some of the rich drama that the House of M built. In doing so, the Disney+ show — which, when first announced, was met with puzzlement bordering on indifference by fandom — could become as important to Marvel’s live-action future as M was to its comic legacy.

“We’re going to have a lot of fun. We’re gonna get weird, get deep and finally understand Wanda Maximoff as Scarlet Witch.” That was the edict revealed from the stage of Marvel’s Hall H panel when Marvel Studios head Kevin Feige announced the overall narrative strategy behind the upcoming WandaVision series, slated for release Spring 2021 on Disney+ and set to spill into the horror-tinged Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, opening May 7, 2021 and also to feature Olsen’s Wanda.

WandaVision, set after Avengers: Endgame, aims to explore the fallout Vision’s death has on Wanda (Elizabeth Olsen). The best, and most readily available, way to deliver on that is to tell the House of M story through the MCU’s lens.

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