Agatha All Along Repurposed A Scrapped WandaVision Storyline Involving Quicksilver

Turns out, the "Mare of Easttown" parody that's already become synonymous with Marvel's new show "Agatha All Along" was originally intended for its parent series, "WandaVision." As showrunner Jac Schaeffer explained to The Wrap, the whole thing actually originated as a "CSI" homage episode of "WandaVision" that ended up falling by the wayside after the show's writers honed in on the sitcom format. As a result, she kept the idea tucked away and ended up using it for the "Agatha" series premiere instead.

"It was always the design that ['Agatha'] would start with this true crime episode," Schaeffer told the outlet while discussing the first two episodes of the "WandaVision" spinoff. "That was an idea that I had when I pitched 'WandaVision,'" she continued. "It was going to be the eighth episode of 'WandaVision,' that was going to be like a 'CSI' episode, and she was going to be solving the murder of Pietro." As you may remember, a variation of Wanda's dead brother Pietro showed up in the series' "Full House" episode, played by Evan Peters. The special guest star turned out to actually be a guy from Westview named Ralph who was "cast" in the Pietro role by Agatha's spellwork.

Originally, though, Schaeffer says Pietro "was the one on the slab" instead of Wanda herself. The "CSI" themed episode was meant as a way for Wanda to gain more awareness and "fully understand what's going on" in her skewed TV world, according to the showrunner, but when the writers' room opened up and the team started digging into the details of the nine-episode series, the crime show concept didn't quite fit anymore. "That was a cool idea. But once we got in the writer's room and really started putting that together, it was clear that we needed to have discipline in our approach to 'WandaVision,'" Schaeffer noted.

Schaeffer, a writer and executive producer behind both "WandaVision" and "Agatha All Along" who also made her Marvel directing debut on the latter, said that the "WandaVision" writers ultimately decided to narrow their focus to a specific type of sitcom — the family sitcom — after initially starting with a wider pool of ideas. "Even early, we had a lot of different sitcoms. We had workplace sitcoms and we looked briefly at sort of like socially political sitcoms, and we were like, 'No, it is aspirational family sitcoms only,'" Schaeffer recalled. She also said that she thinks the show's focus on paying homage to family-centric classics like "The Dick Van Dyke Show" and "Modern Family" might be one reason "WandaVision" was so successful.

"So 'CSI' fell away, and I always tucked it in my back pocket," Schaeffer admitted. Of course, in the months and years after "WandaVision" first aired, Scarlet Witch's story was torpedoed by the retcon-heavy Sam Raimi film "Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness," and Kate Winslet played a messy detective and grieving mom in HBO's award-winning miniseries "Mare of Easttown." At some point, the "CSI" concept evolved into the fresher and funnier idea to parody a prestige crime drama about a Lady Cop With Trauma, and Wanda — who was given complexity in one Marvel project only to have it taken away by the next — became the misunderstood dead girl at the center of it all. Schaeffer waiting to do the crime drama bit is an example of writers' patience paying off big time, and both shows are all the better for it.

New episodes of "Agatha All Along" premiere each Wednesday on Disney+.