The Falcon and the Winter Soldier

Essential because it is where Sam Wilson becomes Captain America, which the 2025 film proceeds from directly. Watch Endgame first; the series opens on the question of what to do with a shield that was handed over in its last scene.

Its best material is the thing the films had never addressed. Sam is a Black man being offered a symbol of the American state, and the series takes him to a bank that refuses him a loan and to Isaiah Bradley, a super-soldier from the Korean War who was experimented on and then imprisoned for thirty years and erased. Carl Lumbly's two scenes are the best acting in Marvel's television.

Around that is a conventional action series about a group of insurgents, and the show never resolves what it thinks of them. The Flag Smashers are fighting the displacement caused by the return of half the population, which is a genuinely interesting consequence of Endgame, and their leader is written as sympathetic until the plot needs her not to be.

Daniel Brühl's Zemo returns and is the most entertaining presence in it. The buddy-comedy material between the two leads works. The finale includes a speech to a committee that the series has not quite earned.