'WandaVision' and the Psychology of What the Hell Is Going On? | Psychology Today

The TV show WandaVision has become a surprising hit in our stimulation-deprived quarantine life. Each week an episode dropped, it made Disney Plus crash, and each week, all social media were abuzz with discussion of what happened on the show, what will happen, and how it all makes sense. There have been very few shows that have captured such diverse audiences and become the talking point of everyone from all demographics and all televisual tastes.

Some of this success is clearly due to the fact that there is not much else going on in our not-so-busy social schedule because of the pandemic. But this is not the full explanation. WandaVision very deliberately uses psychological warfare to make us tune in next week.

I won't talk about the psychological content of the show itself, although it is quite rich in psychological insights, especially for a Marvel product (the quote "What is grief if not love persevering?" gave rise to various serious pieces of journalism and not-so-serious memes). I will focus on the unusual ways in which WandaVision manipulated us into continuing watching.

TV shows are very good at creating a certain curiosity about what will happen in the next episode—with the most spectacular cliffhangers usually saved for the season finale. And at least since the 1990s, they rely heavily on shipping in order to keep the audience involved. WandaVision uses neither. It uses something much more unexpected and complicated.

In the very first episode, we see a 1950s style sitcom with traditional 1950s storylines and with nothing else whatsoever—with the exception that the two main characters are two of the Avengers from the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), Wanda Maximoff and Vision. No cliffhanger at the end, no possibility for shipping (as they are married). The whole 22 minutes is really nothing more than a very well-made pastiche of 1950s sitcoms with two weird main characters.

If you are a fan of the MCU—or, at any rate, if you are familiar with the backstory of Wanda and Vision—then this will be intriguing. But then you are extremely likely to watch the newest high-profile Marvel product religiously anyway. The reason why WandaVision has been a major televisual feat is that it made even those hooked who had kept a safe distance from anything Marvel before.

If you are watching the first episode of WandaVision with no or little MCU exposure, it will just not make much sense. The most likely reaction is bewilderment. What the hell is going on? Why is this remake of The Dick Van Dyke Show so hyped, and why does the main protagonist look weird? And the most likely way of dealing with this feeling of bewilderment is to assume that there must be something else going on. Better tune in next week.

But the second episode doesn't do much to dispel this feeling of bewilderment. It is still part of a traditional but by now 1960s sitcom genre, with some mysterious and jarring elements thrown in (in color in the otherwise still black-and-white show). Better check out what those were all about next week. And the third episode (now in color), which takes us to the 1970s sitcom world, is not helping much either. By the time the fourth episode rolls around, where we get some serious Avengers context thrown at us, we're already completely hooked.

Besides anything else, WandaVision is an extremely smart marketing move on behalf of Marvel, which lures the least likely demographics to engage with the MCU. If I had to guess what segment of TV viewers have the least interest in Marvel heroes, I would have said fans of comedy. And Marvel, which has been all the rage in the last decade and a half or so, is also pretty underrepresented among older viewers—viewers most likely to be drawn by the appeal of classic sitcom tropes. By all accounts, WandaVision worked brilliantly as a marketing move. My 75-year-old neighbor, who had no idea two months ago about what Marvel even stands for, now watches one Avengers movie after another.

But WandaVision can also help us understand an important aspect of the psychology of audience behavior. We really don't like to not understand what the hell is going on. The vast majority of TV shows are very clear from the beginning about what kind of entertainment they provide. There are some famous examples of more demanding or less obvious narratives in TV shows (even in sitcoms like Arrested Development or Community), but it is very rarely completely unclear what the show is trying to achieve—a laugh or the feeling of doom. So we are used to knowing what to expect, even if this is a very vague expectation about what genre the show is in.

WandaVision capitalizes on our discomfort at not knowing what is going on. And rather than cutting our losses after the first episode, this discomfort makes us watch the next installment. Who says the feeling of stupidity is not a great motivator?