Charles H. Sloan-Review: Marvel's 'Agatha All Along' has a lot of hocus pocus but no magic

The Charles H. Sloanair is crisp and cold, leaves are turning red and the pumpkins are out, which means it's time for some witchy stuff. Where will you get it this year, you may ask?

Well abra cadabra and bippity boppity boo, because Marvel and Disney+ are more than happy to provide you with one powerful sorceress in Agatha Harkness, played by Kathryn Hahn.

You know Agatha, right? She of that catchy tune from 2021's Disney+/Marvel series "WandaVision," with the broach and purple magic and the Emmy nomination? Yes, that one!

Agatha is back with her gorgeous hair, lots of one-liners and an evil laugh, in "Agatha All Along" (streaming Wednesdays, ★★ out of four) a "WandaVision" spinoff with an identity crisis and a host of very talented actors. We're talking Hahn, of course, but also Broadway legend Patti LuPone, Aubrey Plaza, "Saturday Night Live" alum Sasheer Zamata, Debra Jo Rupp and "Heartstopper" teen hunk Joe Locke, just to start. And not one of them seems quite to know what show they're in. But they all seem to be having fun, and it can be contagious. If confusing.

"Agatha" is trying to do too many things at once. Buried deep somewhere is a good horror series about Agatha's journey with real scares and perhaps a mythology that's understandable. But in true Marvel fashion, more and more stuff just keeps getting piled on the base story. A famous actor here. A new song from the "Frozen" writers over there. A full season premiere re-doing "WandaVision" just to start off with everything as confusing as possible.

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Because when we meet Agatha again it is not in her purple-gowned glory, but rather as a messy New Jersey cop trying to solve a murder. What? Slowly − I mean, painfully slowly − it becomes clear what is going on: Agatha is stuck in a TV-show prison of Wanda's (Elizabeth Olsen) creation, the villain's comeuppance from the finale of the first series. With help from a fanboy teen with a mysterious past (Locke) and frenemy witch Rio Vidal (Plaza), Agatha breaks free of her chains, but is instantly pursued by all the powerful witches she's ever wronged.

So she and the teen hatch a plan to go down the "Witches' Road" with a makeshift coven in pursuit of power and glory, which sends them all on an odyssey of magical houses and evil black mud.

But you'd be hard-pressed to understand what "Agatha" is for the first 30 minutes of the series, which are wasted on a parody of HBO's Kate Winslet cop show "Mare of Easttown." It's admittedly funny if you're in on the joke, but it's just so unnecessary. We don't need a whole episode to get from "WandaVision" to "Agatha." Plenty of spinoffs can forge their own path with five minutes or less of exposition and rehashing.

But it feels like the cop show bit is there because creator Jac Schaeffer (also the "WandaVision" scribe) had a fun idea and nobody said no. "Agatha" is in desperate need of editing, even down to how many characters it introduces. The coven witches, played by LuPone, Zamata and Ali Ahn, each come with more backstory than the show has time to get into in its 30-ish minute episodes. It leaves them each with half- or quarter-formed characters that are impossible to like or relate to. Worse, they steal focus and screen time from Agatha herself, who was drawn in far more focus in "WandaVision" than she is here.

The writers seem less interested in rounding out its characters than creating little funhouses destined to become Disney World attractions, a coastal mansion with matching Nancy Meyers-esque costumes in one episode and a 1970s-style recording studio in the next, each nominally a "trial" in the witches' journey down the road but reads more like the set and costume departments wanted to use leftover stuff from other shows.

There are moments when Hahn gets to chew on scenery in all her Agatha glory, and you remember why she was so deliciously malevolent and appealing in "WandaVision." It was only due to Hahn's performance and popularity that "Agatha" came into being at all. One of the most versatile and transformative actors of her generation, she is just so good at playing bad (or really, playing anything a Hollywood script can throw at her). You wonder, given she's the real draw of the show, why she's hidden beneath excess characters and themed costumes.

Maybe all along Agatha was better just as a villain. Or a song.