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If instead of being a kiddie show, the 1960's Batman had been like Agent Carter, I'm sure I would have wanted to watch it religiously. I'm not sure it would have been as big a hit as it was, but I personally would have liked it.
Our tastes change, but some things linger. I really never got into adventure comics as a kid. My favorites were Batman and Wonder Woman, but if I read an issue of either over a couple years, that was a lot of time spent with adventure comics for me, especially after I was old enough to be buying my own comics instead of reading what my brother and sister brought home. The new Agent Carter show is a pretty good comic. But I haven't had a lot of interest in that kind of comics ever. I think it is definitely a well done show, but it's too 'busy' for me. I'd like it better if if were paced less like a comic book. I'd like it much better if it were less fanatically anti-male.
The facts:
I think we need to give the show multiple breaks when it comes to props of the correct era. Before the show started last night I was expecting the cars to be of the wrong age. In the all-too-quickly-paced opening, there is a scene where Peggy crosses the street in front of three(?) lanes of correctly aged cars. I quickly decided it was computer graphics. If by chance it wasn't, it was a very impressive moment. Once the action starts she's riding around in cars from the 1950s. Even though some of the wild car action would have been seen in comics from the 1940s, 1950s cars were much better designed for that kind of thing. Also filming inside of (even a mock up of) a real car from the 1940s would be a disaster. There is a reason why there were so many convertible cars in TV and movies from the late 1940s and early 1950s that had nothing to do with filming in California. They not only looked sporty, the ability to control lighting on set was a heck of a lot better. The milk trucks looked too new, but again where are you going to get a bunch of vans from the late 1940s? For the sake of the TV show, cars from that era did have bumpers you could cleanly remove without making an ugly mess out of the car. I wouldn't advice yanking one off the car without undoing the bolts, though.
The sight of giant telephone switch boards in one part of the building and dial telephones in the back is a little odd, far from impossible, but odd. Remember that it wasn't all that many years ago that the telephone company actually owned all the phones in most small businesses and homes. So either the phone company needed the giant switch boards because the phones it owned were all the old-fashioned kind, or it was working toward replacing home phones with newer dial phones. I think dial phones started to come into use in the late 1930s, and there were still parts of rural America with crank-type phones in the mid 1960s that only worked through a phone company manual switch board. Even in large cities with dial telephone service, telephone company switchboards continued for many years, of course, but on a smaller scale and mostly for long distance calls. Large businesses (and government agencies) often had their own internal phone systems and their own switch boards and could have had any phones they wanted to buy internally. They could use the dials for internal calls and go through a switch board operator for calls outside the building.
Yes, there were women-only residence hotels in large cities in the 1940s, though I doubt there were any that were both so palatial (500 sq ft apartments according to her friend, the waitress) and affordable as the one Peggy will be living in.
Our tastes change, but some things linger. I really never got into adventure comics as a kid. My favorites were Batman and Wonder Woman, but if I read an issue of either over a couple years, that was a lot of time spent with adventure comics for me, especially after I was old enough to be buying my own comics instead of reading what my brother and sister brought home. The new Agent Carter show is a pretty good comic. But I haven't had a lot of interest in that kind of comics ever. I think it is definitely a well done show, but it's too 'busy' for me. I'd like it better if if were paced less like a comic book. I'd like it much better if it were less fanatically anti-male.
The facts:
I think we need to give the show multiple breaks when it comes to props of the correct era. Before the show started last night I was expecting the cars to be of the wrong age. In the all-too-quickly-paced opening, there is a scene where Peggy crosses the street in front of three(?) lanes of correctly aged cars. I quickly decided it was computer graphics. If by chance it wasn't, it was a very impressive moment. Once the action starts she's riding around in cars from the 1950s. Even though some of the wild car action would have been seen in comics from the 1940s, 1950s cars were much better designed for that kind of thing. Also filming inside of (even a mock up of) a real car from the 1940s would be a disaster. There is a reason why there were so many convertible cars in TV and movies from the late 1940s and early 1950s that had nothing to do with filming in California. They not only looked sporty, the ability to control lighting on set was a heck of a lot better. The milk trucks looked too new, but again where are you going to get a bunch of vans from the late 1940s? For the sake of the TV show, cars from that era did have bumpers you could cleanly remove without making an ugly mess out of the car. I wouldn't advice yanking one off the car without undoing the bolts, though.
The sight of giant telephone switch boards in one part of the building and dial telephones in the back is a little odd, far from impossible, but odd. Remember that it wasn't all that many years ago that the telephone company actually owned all the phones in most small businesses and homes. So either the phone company needed the giant switch boards because the phones it owned were all the old-fashioned kind, or it was working toward replacing home phones with newer dial phones. I think dial phones started to come into use in the late 1930s, and there were still parts of rural America with crank-type phones in the mid 1960s that only worked through a phone company manual switch board. Even in large cities with dial telephone service, telephone company switchboards continued for many years, of course, but on a smaller scale and mostly for long distance calls. Large businesses (and government agencies) often had their own internal phone systems and their own switch boards and could have had any phones they wanted to buy internally. They could use the dials for internal calls and go through a switch board operator for calls outside the building.
Yes, there were women-only residence hotels in large cities in the 1940s, though I doubt there were any that were both so palatial (500 sq ft apartments according to her friend, the waitress) and affordable as the one Peggy will be living in.
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You can kind of handwave the cars and technology a little - in that the Marvel Universe tends to always have some degree of super-tech beyond what the real world does.
It suffers - as many period shows now do - because of Mad Men. That shows remarkable attention to detail has trained a lot of viewers to care about accuracy both in detail and in mood. Carter is trying to hard to show how heroic the heroine is by making almost all of the men heels... and at the same time, giving her a fistfight every five minutes. (At least Hayley Atwell isn't a credulity straining waif, though Ms. Carter's unwrapped mitts should be quite bruised and swollen this morning...)
It's kind of cartoonish in the wrong sort of way - Mad Men sometimes strikes wrong notes, but it was very strong in conveying gender roles with far more nuance and deftness... and because it exists it makes Carter look artless for not doing a better job of doing that for the immediate postwar.
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