WandaVisionThe inventive approach to mixing different narrative genres made it one of the most compelling pieces of television Marvel has ever produced. The show became must-watch week after week as it fleshed out its central mystery in a way that was fun. And for a while it felt like WandaVisionThe story was part of an ambitious plan to take Marvel’s films in an interesting new direction.

Marvel apparently lost the thread of this plan somewhere between WandaVision And Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness — a follow-up film that skipped the juicy emotional moments of the show in favor of dizzying spectacles and explicit horror moods. But Agatha all the timeDisney Plus’ latest MCU series, from showrunner Jac Schaeffer, feels like a sign that the studio has learned some valuable lessons from its chaotic multiverse experiment.

Set several years after the events of WandaVision And Multiverse of Madness, Agatha all the time picks up the story of the titular sorceress (Kathryn Hahn) at a time when her world once again seems to be falling apart – albeit under slightly different circumstances. Although almost everyone remembers what happened the last time witches appeared in Westview, New Jersey, the town is actually a pretty peaceful place where people have learned to get on with their lives.

While people like Sharon Davis (Debra Jo Rupp) have become accustomed to scurrying past the vacant lot where the Maximoff/Vision family used to live, their collective trauma prevents them from saying her names out of fear that she might come back. But it also makes it easy for them to accept Agnes/Agatha Harkness (Hahn) as an ordinary, if eccentric, woman trying to cope with something they’ve all been through. To them, Agatha’s mood swings and her insistence on being called “Agnes” are just quirky coping mechanisms. But in truth, these are some of the first signs of Agatha becoming aware of the magical prison she was trapped in when we last saw her.

Agatha all the time seems to aim for a slow burn at first, while it takes you into a WandaVision-like parody of crime dramas (instead of sitcoms) like Mare by Easttown And True Detective. But the show quickly changes subject, in a way that reads like Marvel understood that the show needed to go beyond the inspired gimmick of its predecessors. It doesn’t take long for Agatha to come to her senses with the help of her former lover Rio Vidal (Aubrey Plaza) and a magically gifted teenager she calls Teen (Joe Locke). With Agatha’s powers now all gone, however, she must form a coven and set out on the witches’ path to return to her former glory.

Whereas WandaVision only became really witchy in the last episodes, Agatha all the time dives right into magic, as it focuses on painting a more detailed picture of who Harkness is and how witchcraft (which is different from the whole Doctor Strange thing) works. WandaVision alluded to Agatha’s treacherous past, but the new show explores how her centuries-long path to power made her a despised villain in the witch community long before she ever set foot in Westview.

The sitcom Agnes/Agatha was a highlight in WandaVision, where her irrepressible energy helped sell the show’s vanity and keep viewers guessing who was really pulling the strings. But Agatha all the time gives Hahn even more room to expand and disguise herself, while Agatha’s search for a coven leads her to other witches like wellness guru Jennifer Kale (Sasheer Zamata), fortune teller Lilia Calderu (Patti LuPone) and security guard Alice Wu-Gulliver (Ali Ahn) – all of whom they see as a threat. They know that Agatha has killed members of her own coven before and there’s something odd about Teen not being able to tell them about his origins. But the Witch’s Way can give each of them something they desperately want if they join Agatha on her quest.

Although it is interesting to see more of Marvel’s “grounded” magical world represented by Agatha all the timeThe show, despite the new characters, has a distinct “I’m putting together a ragtag team” vibe that makes the individual installments feel formulaic at times. Teen – a gothic Agatha fanboy played by Locke with charm and a noticeably hard-to-place accent – is meant to be one of the show’s compelling mysteries. But he’s also a stand-in for the audience, whose curious conversations with the other witches sometimes come across as the show taking a moment to over-explain plot points that don’t really need explaining.

Every bit of world-building lore the series establishes—there are always enough “witchy” people within a three-mile radius to form a coven, for example—is followed by a repetition of why everyone follows Agatha. Occasionally, this makes the series feel unsure whether it is introducing too much lore. But when Agatha all the time embraces its weirdness and trusts you to piece things together, the series becomes much more of a spooky joyride that feels like Schaeffer is once again reflecting his attempt to bring a truly unique energy to the MCU.

This can be clearly felt and seen when the gang actually finds themselves on the Witches’ Road – an otherworldly realm in which they must face a series of tests designed to test their knowledge of magic. Similar to WandaVision embodied the styles of various sitcoms, Agatha all the time feels like an ode (music features largely) to horror classics like Rosemary’s Baby and newer tariffs such as American Horror Story: Coven.

Although some of the trials are a little cheesy – at one point the witches fight against a generational curse – they all show how much of Agatha all the timeThe magic of is practically staged as a complement to the show’s elaborate sets, setting the show apart from Marvel’s usual CGI-heavy projects and acting as a solid example of the studio putting art above spectacular spectacle.

Agatha all the time is still a late-stage Marvel show, which means there are moments where your appreciation of what it’s doing depends on how familiar you are with recent events in the larger cinematic universe. But for viewers who have been reading along and are hoping that the studio will get back to releasing really weird and playful variations on the comics instead of hyping up the next big event, Agatha all the time should be a pleasure to watch – especially when his big secrets are revealed over the course of the autumn.

Agatha all the time also stars Paul Adelstein, Miles Gutierrez-Riley, Okwui Okpokwasili, Emma Caulfield, David Payton, Kate Forbes and Asif Ali. The first two episodes of the series will be released on September 18 on Disney Plus.