Marvel’s Agents Of S.H.I.E.L.D.: 5 Things We Learned About Joss Whedon’s New ABC Series

New details have emerged about ABC’s new fall televisions series “Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.”

Executive Producer Joss Whedon, as well as cast members Clark Gregg (Agent Phil Coulson), Ming-Na Wen (Agent Melinda May), Brett Dalton (Agent Grant Ward), Chloe Bennet (Skye), Iain De Caestecker (Agent Leo Fitz), Elizabeth Henstridge (Agent Jemma Simmons), and four other executive producers of the show, hit the Television Critics Association Summer Tour in Beverly Hills on Sunday evening and dished to reporters a few details about the program, which has so far, been clouded in a fair bit of secrecy.

Here’s a few details we gleaned from the session, which followed a screening for reporters and critics of the premiere episode.

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How Big The Show Can Be Week To Week: “It looks bigger than you think we spent on it because it was directed and put together by people who are really good at doing that,” Executive Producer Jeffrey Bell said. “We have a terrific writing staff who are writing stories, a production team who are telling us what we can and cannot do and also, both Marvel and ABC have been very generous with us and we have a responsibility to Marvel to look awesome and terrific, but I think what Joss, Jed [Whedon, EP] and Maurissa [Tancharoen, EP] have done with characters is hopefully give you characters that you care about and get people invested. And so we will have visuals and action and emotions, but really, it’s these people and their lives, with this wonderful cast that we hope you’ll come back for.”

How Involved Joss Whedon Will Be: “As much as an executive producer can whose also making a movie,” Joss, who will direct “The Avengers: Age of Ultron,” said. “I got the best writers I know to do this and actors who can do pretty much anything, so I can do less. That’s always the way to run a show.”

On How Clark Gregg Found Out Agent Coulson Was Coming Back From His ‘Avengers’ Death Scene For This Show: “My next to last day on ‘The Avengers’ involved this Asgardian fellow impaling me quite convincingly. And while I was surprised how emotional it was to me to give up the character and the longtime job… it was really clear that I was dead. I had a great run and I thought what Joss did with the character was such a magnificent kind of resolve with it and I love what happened in ‘The Avengers.’ … Four or five months after ‘The Avengers,’ I got a call from Joss and we talked about how much we wanted to have whatever reason Coulson had for being alive and walking around not be anything that undermined the reality of ‘The Avengers’ and when [he] explained to me [a few details], I [put down] the phone very deeply on board,” Clark said.

Chloe Bennet On Her Character, Skye, Who Encounters S.H.I.E.L.D. In The Premiere Episode: “What’s interesting about Skye is she’s a computer hacker, but she’s not one of those ‘Girl with the Dragon Tattoo’ awkward, socially inept computer hackers, she’s actually better with people, I think, than computers, so I think you’re gonna see a lot of her being Skye and working people just as much as computers,” she said.

What The Show Will Look Like Week To Week: “There’ll be a challenge every week, I’ll say. We’re gonna try to hit all sorts of different things and hopefully, the characters will be dealing with each other enough that there’ll be stuff to interweave through the standalone episodes,” Jed Whedon, an EP on the show, said. “But then, it is a Marvel thing, so there’s gonna be an overarching mythology and all of that stuff will come into play.”

“Every week it’s not going to be some new hero,” Joss added. “There could be fights, there could be a mystery. There are so many aspects to what happened since everyone in the world found out that there’s a superhero team and there are aliens that invaded New York and we want to be able to change it up every week. We want to be able to deal with every aspect — the spy stuff, the hero stuff, the heartfelt stuff. We want to make sure the humor [is there], obviously, but every week, you get something that feels a little bit different.”

— Jolie Lash