Secret Invasion fixes the fatal flaw of Marvel TV series – but only for a minute

Early on in episode two of Marvel’s Secret Invasion, counterintelligence agent Nick Fury (Samuel L Jackson) and his alien sidekick Talos (Ben Mendelsohn) have a conversation on a train. Both Jackson and Mendelsohn are formidable actors, if the material’s good – and here, it seems like it might be. Fury starts monologuing, relaying a simple allegorical anecdote about his youth in segregated Alabama. The speech is nothing profound by any means, but it draws you in: Jackson, given the chance to indulge his hammier instincts, squeezes his patient drawl for every drop of gravitas. For a minute or two, Marvel’s latest streaming venture seems like a proper TV series.

Jackson has now played Fury in 11 films across the popular Marvel Cinematic Universe superhero franchise, seldom getting the chance to evince anything resembling real human emotion. This scene in the train carriage sits in stark contrast to the usual Marvel tone, which traffics in glib quips and blandly economical story-driven dialogue. The change of pace works: we’re lured in. But then the anecdote is over. And it’s Mendelsohn’s time to speak. Within a matter of seconds, the scene accelerates into high gibberish, and the two men start yelling unconvincingly at each other about alien invasions and intergalactic conflict. Ah, well. It was nice while it lasted.

The scene is, in many ways, a microcosm of exactly what’s wrong with Secret Invasion as a whole. It is a series that was billed as a dark, down-to-earth spy drama that just happened to involve shape-shifting aliens. It’s an expensive, self-serious production with a big-name cast; alongside Jackson and Mendelsohn, the series stars Kingsley Ben-Adir, Emilia Clarke, Olivia Colman and Don Cheadle. More than anything, Secret Invasion wants to be taken seriously. And in flashes – such as Jackson’s careful monologue – it manages this. But for all its aspirations of grit and intrigue, Secret Invasion always lapses inevitably into a tenor of daffy supernatural melodrama. Director Ali Selim talked up the series’ heavyweight influences in an interview with Empire, saying the early episodes were striving for the vein of “classic espionage noir, like The Third Man”. Forget The Third Man – I’m not sure Secret Invasion manages to live up to the lofty dramatic peaks of Orson Welles’ frozen peas commercial.

Jackson, in particular, would have a right to feel aggrieved at the flimsiness of the material. Whatever your opinion of the Marvel assembly-line media machine, it’s hard to deny the brilliance of his original casting. The actor was not yet 60 when he first appeared as the hard-bitten, eyepatch-wearing Fury in a short scene at the end of Iron Man (2008). Now 74, Jackson wears the character like a glove. (Fury wasn’t created for Jackson, but he proved so indelible in the role that the original character, a distinctly not-bald white guy, was retired from the main Marvel Comics line and replaced with someone in Jackson’s image.) The prospect of seeing his character fleshed out was enticing; Jackson waited a decade and a half for his own spin-off, gamely putting in the hours as perennial supporting man. That the end product should be so overwrought, so unwilling to sit with its own pared-back premise, does a grievous disservice to him as a performer.

The result of this, inevitably, is that people stop paying attention. Just two weeks into a six-episode weekly run, Secret Invasion has already dropped off the map. It has invaded the streaming service so secretly that most people have overlooked it entirely. This is an observable trend with Marvel series – after Disney scored a solitary hit in January 2021 with the parodic spin-off WandaVision, all subsequent attempts to transpose Marvel’s cinematic dominance to the small screen have come up short. Loki; Ms Marvel; Hawkeye; Moon Knight; She-Hulk: these are expensive, aggressively publicised productions, many of which feature talented, famous stars. But no one, outside of the stubborn Marvel faithful, seems to be watching or talking about them.

There was a time when an A-lister like Jackson wouldn’t dream of stooping to the ignominy of TV. Over the past decade or two, that stigma has gradually dissipated, with more and more high-profile actors turning to TV and streaming for the meaty, adult roles that commercial cinema is no longer able to provide. But Secret Invasion, despite its aspirations, is not this. It is utterly expendable schlock – full of Fury, perhaps, but signifying nothing. And it seems like people are catching on.

‘Secret Invasion’ is available to stream on Disney+ now