WandaVision director explains why The Office US wasn’t given its own parody episode

Full House and Family Ties were also considered when deciding which sitcoms to parody

The director of WandaVision has named some of the US sitcoms which almost received parodies in the Disney Plus Marvel series.

WandaVision focuses on Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen) and Vision (Paul Bettany) as they live in an altered reality styled after classic sitcoms.

For the first several episodes of the series’ run, each instalment would parody a different sitcom, with examples including Bewitched, Malcolm in the Middle and Modern Family.

Speaking to Entertainment Weekly, the series’ director Matt Shakman said: “There are a great many wonderful shows like Taxi or The Office that could’ve been inspirations, but the ones that we focused on were the ones that were about family because that’s obviously what Wanda yearns for.

“She loses her family when she’s young, she loses her brother, she loses Vision and the family that might have been. So the family sitcoms were the strongest thematic connection to that.”

Read more: WandaVision finale will ‘disappoint’ some viewers, says series director

While the seventh episode of the series did in fact feature an opening credits sequence which parodied the opening of The Office (US), the style of the show was more closely modelled after Modern Family.

“We did look at Full House,” Shakman added. “We did look at Family Ties, we did look at Growing Pains. We looked at so many different shows, and I have some small nods in there.”

The finale of WandaVision arrives on Disney Plus this Friday (5 March).