WandaVision‘s inventive approach to blending different narrative genres made it one of the most compelling pieces of television Marvel has ever produced. The show became a fixture to watch week after week, as it played out its central mystery in a way that was fun to follow. And for a while, it felt like WandaVisionThe story was part of an ambitious plan to take Marvel’s films in interesting new directions.

Marvel seems to have lost the thread of that plan somewhere between the two. WandaVision And Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness — a sequel that glossed over the show’s juicy emotional beats in favor of giddy spectacle and more explicit horror vibes. But Agatha Always AlreadyDisney Plus’ latest MCU series from showrunner Jac Schaeffer feels like a sign that the studio has learned some valuable lessons from its messy multiversal experiment.

The story takes place a few years after the events of WandaVision And Multiverse of madness, Agatha Always Already picks up the story of the titular sorceress (Kathryn Hahn) at a time when everything in her world seems to be falling apart once again — albeit under slightly different circumstances. While most everyone remembers what happened the last time witches showed up in Westview, New Jersey, the town is actually a fairly peaceful place where people have learned to move on with their lives.

While people like Sharon Davis (Debra Jo Rupp) have grown accustomed to running past the vacant lot where the Maximoff/Vision family once lived, their collective trauma prevents them from saying her name out of fear that she might return. But it also makes it easy for them to accept Agnes/Agatha Harkness (Hahn) as an ordinary, if eccentric, woman trying to cope with something they’ve all been through. To them, Agatha’s mood swings and insistence on being called “Agnes” are just strange coping mechanisms. But in reality, these are some of the first signs that Agatha is becoming aware of the magical prison she was trapped in when we last saw her.

Agatha Always Already It seems like it’s aiming for a slow burn at first, while in a WandaVision-esque parody of crime dramas (rather than sitcoms) such as Mare of Easttown And Real Detective. But the show quickly shifts gears in a way that reads as if Marvel understands that the show needs to move beyond the inspired gimmick of its predecessors. It doesn’t take long for Agatha to come to her senses with the help of her former lover Rio Vidal (Aubrey Plaza) and a magically gifted teenager she calls Teen (Joe Locke). With all of her powers stripped, however, Agatha must form a coven and travel the Witches’ Road to restore herself to her former glory.

While WandaVision only really got witchy in the last few episodes, Agatha Always Already dives straight into the magic, giving a more detailed look at who Harkness is and how witchcraft (which is separate from Doctor Strange’s entire story) works. WandaVision references Agatha’s treacherous past, but the new series will explore how her centuries-long path to power made her a reviled villain in the witch community long before she ever set foot in Westview.

Sitcom Agnes/Agatha was a highlight in WandaVision, where her unbridled energy helped sell the show and kept viewers guessing as to who was really pulling everyone’s strings. But Agatha Always Already gives Hahn even more room to flaunt and vamp, while Agatha’s hunt for a coven leads her to other witches — like wellness guru Jennifer Kale (Sasheer Zamata), fortune teller Lilia Calderu (Patti LuPone), and security guard Alice Wu-Gulliver (Ali Ahn) — all of whom see her as a threat. They know Agatha has murdered members of her own coven before, and there’s something odd about the way Teen can’t tell them where he came from. But the Witches’ Road could give each of them something they desperately want if they join Agatha on her quest.

While it’s interesting to see more of Marvel’s more “grounded” magical world fleshed out by Agatha Always Already‘s new characters, the show has a decidedly “I’m putting together a rag-tag team” vibe that occasionally makes its beats feel formulaic. Teen — a goth Agatha fanboy Locke plays with charm and a noticeably hard-to-place accent — is meant to be one of the show’s compelling mysteries. But he’s also an audience surrogate whose curious exchanges with the other witches sometimes feel like the show is taking a moment to explain plot points that don’t really need spelling out.

Every bit of worldbuilding the show introduces — there are always enough “witchy” people within a three-mile radius to form a coven, for example — is followed by a rehash of why everyone follows Agatha. Sometimes it makes the show feel uncertain or like it’s introducing too much lore. But when Agatha Always Already leans into the weirdness and trusts you to piece the puzzle together, making the series more of a creepy ride reminiscent of Schaeffer’s attempt to bring a truly unique energy to the MCU.

You can clearly feel and see this once the gang actually finds themselves on the Witches’ Road – an otherworldly realm where they must undergo a series of trials designed to test their knowledge of magic. Similar to the way WandaVision embodied the styles of several sitcoms, Agatha Always Already feels like an ode (music contains largely) to horror classics such as Rosemary’s baby and newer rates such as American Horror Story: Coven.

While some of the trials are a little cheesy – at one point the witches are battling a generational curse – they all highlight how much Agatha Always Already‘s magic is practically manufactured to compliment the show’s intricate sets. It makes the show stand out from Marvel’s usual CGI-laden projects and feels like a solid example of the studio prioritizing art over whizbang spectacle.

Agatha Always Already is still a late-stage Marvel show, meaning there are times when your appreciation for what it’s doing will depend on how familiar you are with the latest happenings in the larger cinematic universe. But for viewers who’ve been following along hoping the studio would get back to genuinely weird and playful riffs on the comics instead of pushing the next big event, Agatha Always Already will be a joy to watch, especially when it begins to reveal its big secrets later this fall.

Agatha Always Already also stars Paul Adelstein, Miles Gutierrez-Riley, Okwui Okpokwasili, Emma Caulfield, David Payton, Kate Forbes and Asif Ali. The first two episodes of the series will debut on Disney Plus on September 18.