12 Things Agents Of SHIELD Needs To Fix For Season 2

7. A Shorter, Tighter, Leaner Season

Hardly anyone who watched the entirety of the first season will tell you that they could really have done with another episode or two to flesh things out a bit more. Agents Of SHIELD isn't the kind of show to leave much to the imagination (except when it comes to ultimately disappointing teasers about Melinda May's past), being big and bright and hammering the audience over the head with exposition at every turn, and it's something of a fossil in today's TV environment in that it had a traditional full run of 22 episodes as opposed to the current standard of 13 (or even Game of Thrones' 10 or True Detective's 8). That's almost twice the number, and it left the season feeling bloated and trivial at times. When a series has a shorter run, the few episodes it does have tend to feel much more important than those shows that run for half the year or more. When that happens, overexposure sets in and many fans might take a series for granted because it's ALWAYS on. Marvel and ABC should probably try the HBO model - or, indeed, even their own Netflix/Defenders one - in keeping a season shorter and more tightly focused instead of trying for twenty-two done-in-one action-packed stories that they can easily repeat in any order they like. That might work for syndication, but a coherent television show it does not make. Some might suggest that having nine fewer episodes won't make the writing any better, but if the showrunners have a clear end in sight, they'll know exactly what story they want to tell and have a much better idea of how to tell it, and they'll make those episodes really count.