Agent Carter will be back for season 2. ABC renewed Agent Carter on Thursday, May 7, bringing back the Marvel character for another year on the network. It’s unclear what Peggy Carter will be up to this time around, but the writers have a lot to build off in a successful first season. As a report from Eonline.com proclaims, “ Marvel’s Agent Carter is both the female superhero we deserve and need.”
For anyone still in the dark about what Agent Carter entails, it picks up after the first Captain America film comes to a close. Though Steve Rogers (Chris Evans) flies off (spoiler alert), and ends up crashing his plane into the ice, life continues for the agents working at SSR. That includes Peggy Carter (Hayley Atwell), who had developed feelings for Captain America, but now needs to get back to work. The first season only ran eight episodes on ABC, but the network decided to bring it back.
As previously reported on the Inquisitr , the Agent Carter ratings weren’t that great. The series premiere came on Jan. 6, with an estimated 6.91 million viewers tuning in. Another 3.25 million viewers came through DVR recordings watched a bit later. The ratings progressively dropped with each episode, reaching a low mark of about 4.02 million live viewers for the season finale. Those aren’t good numbers for ABC, which makes the news about an Agent Carter renewal a bit perplexing.
A report from EW.com back on Jan. 17 had the executives at ABC defending the low ratings that Agent Carter was pulling in. ABC entertainment president Paul Lee talked at length about it, expressing how well it worked to have Agent Carter on the air while Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. was on hiatus.
“We feel very optimistic about it. S.H.I.E.L.D. is actually a great and powerful show for us, [it’s 18-49 demo rating with seven days of DVR playback] pops up to a 3.0, it brings in a male audience for us and it’s creatively really strong now. We left a great cliffhanger at the end of Christmas and now it’s going to come back with some fantastic storylines. And to have Agent Carter in the [ S.H.I.E.L.D. hiatus] gap doing sort of double what we were doing there last year is great for us.”
One way to view the comments from Lee, was that he felt running episodes of Agent Carter was better than the alternatives ABC had going for it. While it wasn’t a glowing endorsement of Agent Carter, or star Hayley Atwell, it did show network support for the short seven-week run. The show did well enough to garner a new episode order, though, and ABC will probably use it to fill gaps in other programming once again.
Hayley Atwell often used her Twitter account to promote the show, retweeting quite a few articles that had been written about renewing Agent Carter for a second season. Now Atwell and the fans will be seeing more of Peggy Carter very soon.
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