Clark Gregg Profanely Defends Agents of SHIELD’s MCU Status

Agent Phil Coulson has stared down gods and madmen, and he didn’t blink. But now he’s got to face the most frightening scourge of them all: internet continuity cranks!

Coulson’s actor Clark Gregg addressed those who question the canonical status of Agents of SHIELD, the MCU spinoff that followed Coulson and his team of super-spies. “There’s some people who talk about canon,” he told attendees at an Agents of SHIELD panel at NYCC (via Popverse). “You can go fuck yourself. We’re proud of what we did. We’re proud, really deeply proud, of the connection we have with people like you who come visit and hang with us.”

Angry as Gregg’s words were, continuity cranks do kind of have a point. Prior to WandaVision on Disney+, television series had a contested place in the larger Marvel universe, largely because they weren’t entirely under the purview of MCU boss Kevin Feige. So while Agents of SHIELD and Agent Carter carried over characters introduced in mainline Marvel movies, and even featured appearances by characters from the movies such as Lady Sif and Dum Dum Dugan, they seemed to exist in their own universe.

After Coulson’s death in The Avengers, he never appeared again in a mainline MCU movie, not even during the time travel segment of Avengers: Endgame. Peggy Carter did return a handful of times to Captain America films, and James D’Arcy portrayed Edwin Jarvis, the character he played on Agent Carter, for a brief moment in Endgame. But outside of that, the shows seemed to exist in their own world, as did Daredevil and other series made for Netflix.

But things are starting to change. Daredevil and Kingpin have made their way into the MCU, first through Hawkeye and Spider-Man: No Way Home and then in Daredevil: Born Again, the latter of which Jessica Jones will be joining in season 2, and it seems likely that Luke Cage won’t be far behind. Even more surprising, Anson Mount played the monarch Black Bolt in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, bringing back a character from the much-despised miniseries Inhumans.

Could Agents of SHIELD be the next maligned series to receive proper recognition? Gregg doesn’t seem too worried about it. “Thank God Daredevil’s back on [Disney+],” he told the NYCC crowd, before looking back at the MCU guest stars who appeared on his show “I mean, we would still have people show up, is that true?” he asked, before getting corrected by others in attendance. “No, I guess it was mostly the first couple of seasons,” he admitted, before restating his pride in the series. “We definitely became our own ship out there in the galaxy and I fell like we made it work,” he declared.

And that’s where it stands, at least for now. Agents of SHIELD is its own show and it’s a good show, no matter its canonical status. And if you disagree with that, then you have Agent Coulson to deal with.