Marvel fans have been waiting a long time for Secret Invasion to come to the MCU, but now the series is here, it has landed with a barely audible thump rather than a big fanfare welcome. The viewing figures for last week’s premiere episode have now been released by Samba TV and have shown the arrival of Nick Fury’s major new show be the second lowest premiere of any MCU TV series.

According to the figures, Secret Invasion landed with 994k US households tuning in to see how the Skrull invasion of the MCU begins, which is only just higher than the 775K that tuned into see Ms. Marvel make her MCU debut. While this still is much higher than many regular shows, compared to Loki’s 2.5 million, Moon Knight and The Falcon and the Winter Soldier’s 1.8 million and WandaVision’s 1.6 million, this is another blow for the Marvel machine considering the underperformance of movies like Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania.

In fact, when it comes to Marvel’s live action shows, even the heavily criticized She-Hulk drew in 50% more viewers for its debut, which makes Secret Invasion’s numbers even more of a head-scratcher for Marvel Studios and Disney. The only other series that came in around the level of Secret Invasion was the animated What If…? series, which drew in 1 million.

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Secret Invasion is Not a Typical MCU Show
Disney+

While there are certainly elements of the action-based MCU everyone knows and loves in Secret Invasion, the series takes the opportunity to try something new. Having already tried out some other things, this time around the MCU takes a shot at espionage and shadowplays.

Some people have certainly been happy to see this kind of story coming to the MCU, although with that comes a need for patience that some critics and viewers just don’t have when it comes to a TV show. Secret Invasion gets off to slow start as it builds up its premise, explains some details around Nick Fury’s time out of the spotlight and starts to unravel the story it is preparing to tell over its remaining episodes.

That is the other thing to note when dealing with the MCU’s TV shows. Many of them, like any TV show, can be viewed as a very long movie. That essentially means the opening couple of episodes are usually going to be a little slower, with the later episodes then picking up the pace. That is most likely going to be the case with Secret Invasion, and that could also be one of the reasons that not as many people have been so quick to jump on board the series immediately.

Early Disney+ shows such as WandaVision and Loki benefited from coming in the wake of Avengers: Endgame and Spider-Man: Far From Home, which both left everyone on such a massive high that whatever Marvel followed them up with would have been a huge success, even if they has been something terrible. Now fans are not quite as eager to jump on shows as soon as they air, and would much rather wait and binge watch them later. A good indicator of how true this is will come later this year when Echo becomes the first MCU series to drop all episodes at once in November.