‘Agent Carter’ Ended 10 Years Ago: Details on Season 3 Plans & Revival Chances

Maybe if Agent Carter had launched a few years later, it would have thrived on Disney+, but alas, the series debuted in 2015, while the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s TV properties were split between ABC and Netflix. And after Agent Carter’s Season 2 finale on March 1, 2016, ABC canceled the series, leaving Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. as the network’s only Marvel series.

Agent Carter starred Hayley Atwell as Peggy Carter, a reprisal of her role from the 2011 film Captain America: The First Avenger and the 2013 short Marvel One-Shot: Agent Carter. In the series, Carter works for the S.H.I.E.L.D. precursor Strategic Scientific Reserve while covertly helping Howard Stark (Dominic Cooper, also reprising his First Avenger role), future father of Tony “Iron Man” Stark, recover his stolen weapons of mass destruction and clear his name.

And in the Season 2 finale, Carter and her cohorts defeat the villainous Whitney Frost (Wynn Everett), but SSR colleague Jack Thompson (Chad Michael Murray) is shot and left for dead by an assailant who steals a file purported to contain incriminating information about Carter. And that’s where we left the Agent Carter storyline, though the show’s creative forces have revealed where the plot would have gone next… and whether there’s any hope of a revival.

The cancellation confused Marvel’s TV boss, but Hayley Atwell said it was a “political thing” for ABC.

Even by the time of a post-Season 2 finale interview with Entertainment Weekly, executive producers Michele Fazekas and Tara Butters were feeling “bad” about the show’s renewal prospects.

“People have to watch the show,” Fazekas said. “While I would love to see it continue on, it’s a bummer — a bummer for all of us, cast included. Everybody loves the job, everybody loves working together. I would love to see it live on, even if it’s in some other form, digital or whatever. … We’re not really involved in those decisions anyway. At the end of the day, people have to watch the show.”

Two months later, their fears were realized: News of Agent Carter’s cancellation broke that May.

“There were no conversations,” Jeph Loeb, then head of Marvel Television, told Business Insider a few months later. “We had a call from the network. The network said they were cancelling the show.”

Loeb said he didn’t understand ABC’s decision, but Atwell told IGN in 2017 that it was a “network political thing.” She said, “[ABC] wanted to put me in something mainstream to get their ratings up, rather than something that was more genre-specific. There were a lot of economic decisions behind it, and I wasn’t a part of the conversation.”

(Sure enough, Atwell was cast as the lead of the ABC legal drama Conviction, the series order of which made headlines the same day as Agent Carter’s cancellation, but that show only lasted for one season.)

Writers’ plans for Agent Carter’s third season? Oh, brother!

Sibling dysfunction — or, rather, sibling resurrection — would have set the scene for Season 3, as writer Jose Molina told Den of Geek in 2018. “If memory serves, the initial thrust was going to come from the investigation into the assassination attempt on Jack Thompson,” Moline said. “We were hoping (assuming we could afford it) that the story would then lead us to London, where we would learn that Carter’s late brother Michael was not only alive and kicking, but involved in some very nefarious, super-villainous shenanigans.”

Indeed, the attempt on Thompson’s life wasn’t just a cliffhanger for drama’s sake. “We’ve been planting seeds all season for a third-season arc, and it is obviously because somebody is coming in and stealing that M. Carter file,” Fazekas explained to IGN. “It’s very much tied to a third-season arc. It’s not just ‘Oh, aren’t we cute, we’re doing a cliffhanger.’ This is actually a meaningful thing to happen.”

We’ve seen Agent Carter characters in other TV shows and movies, but is a revival in the cards?

After Agent Carter’s downfall, characters from the series made occasional appearances in other MCU properties. Atwell played Carter onscreen again in the 2019 film Avengers: Endgame, while Agent Carter costar James D’Arcy reprised the role of Jarvis, Howard’s butler and the namesake of Tony Stark’s J.A.R.V.I.S. artificial intelligence system, in a cameo. (The latter character’s Endgame appearance marked the first time the MCU films referenced the MCU TV shows, according to TheWrap.) And Enver Gjokaj played SSR agent Daniel Sousa, his Agent Carter role, in a time-traveling arc in Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.’s seventh season.

Plus, Atwell brought Carter back for the 2022 film Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness and will reportedly do so again in this year’s Avengers: Doomsday. She also voiced the character in the animated TV series Avengers Assemble and What If…?

So we can assume there’s a future for Peggy Carter, but what about Agent Carter? After the TV show’s cancellation at ABC, Atwell told IGN she’d love to star in an Agent Carter film.

Agent Carter co-creator Stephen McFeely told the Los Angeles Times in 2019 that he’d love to see the TV show revived on Disney+.

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“From your lips to [Disney CEO] Bob Iger’s ears,” McFeely said. “I don’t know. It was an expensive show. You’re doing period as well as you can in Los Angeles. I don’t know how big the fanbase is, but what it is is really dedicated. And we love the character. So I don’t know, I just don’t know.”

And as Atwell pointed out, her character’s longevity means there could conceivably be many Agent Carter stories to come: “I know there’ve been online campaigns for it, and the fact that we know that she lives until the age of 96 means that technically I could be employed for the rest of my life.”