14 DAY TRIAL // Fresh off Marvel’s “The Avengers” and right before he starts work on another film in the series, Joss Whedon is sinking his teeth into a television project again: “S.H.I.E.L.D.” for ABC, which he’s constructed specifically as a separate entity.
Whedon wrote the script for and directed “The Avengers,” but he wants “S.H.I.E.L.D.” to introduce new characters. He’s already done with casting for it, he says in an interview with MTV News.
“It’s new characters. It needs to be its own thing. It needs to be adjacent [to the movies]. You don’t want to do a show where you’re constantly going, ‘Iron Man just left, but he was totally here a minute ago’,” Whedon says.
“You want them to go off on their own thing, and say, well, what has S.H.I.E.L.D. got that the heroes don’t have? And part of that for me is, they’re not superheroes, but they live in that universe. That makes them a little bit – even though they’re a big organization – underdogs, and so that’s really interesting to me,” he adds.
Fans of “The Avengers” already got a pretty good look at S.H.I.E.L.D. (Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement and Logistics Division) in the film, so it’s not hard to imagine how the TV series will play out.