Loki (Season 1)

Essential, and the most consequential television Marvel has made: this is where the multiverse is formally opened, and Phase Four and Five both proceed from its last episode. Watch Endgame first, since this Loki escapes during that film's time heist and is a version who never had the subsequent character development.

The design is the reason it stands out. The Time Variance Authority is a bureaucracy rendered in 1970s institutional brown, with wood panelling, analogue terminals, laminated handbooks and a cartoon clock explaining executions, and the joke that the apparatus managing all of reality looks like a tax office is sustained for six hours.

It is also a character piece. A god of mischief is made to watch a recording of his own life and told how it ends, and the series is about a narcissist discovering that he is not special, there are thousands of him, and most of them are worse. Tom Hiddleston and Owen Wilson are an unexpectedly good pairing.

The sixth episode is almost entirely one conversation in a room at the end of time, with Jonathan Majors explaining the premise of the next three years of films, and it is a genuinely strange thing for a blockbuster franchise to do. The second season follows directly.