Why Coulson Is Terrible In Agents Of SHIELD

Look, I don’t mean to keep going on about this show.  But like Season 6 of Buffy, you can sense that this entire season could be salvageable with just a few tweaks, it’s so close to being good that in a way, it’s actually more fascinating to theorize about how to fix it than it is to have a workable show.
But today’s problem’s an easy shot: Why was Agent Coulson so beloved in the Marvel movies, and so tedious in Agents of SHIELD?
It’s who he’s surrounded with.
You know who’s a lot like Coulson?  Mal, from Firefly.  He’s a wry straight man in the middle of a cast of wild guys like Jayne and Wash and Inara and my God I’m falling in love all over again just writing their names.  But Mal is the straight man to the rest of the Firefly cast – he’s the guy with the morals that sets the ship, yes, but a lot of Mal’s best lines are from Mal reacting to someone else.  Mal is beloved because Nathan Fillion is always cocking an eyebrow at his crazy crew, as if to say, Really?  And yes, you love him for it.
Agent Coulson is just as wry, and yet the problem is he’s a straight man in a room full of straight men.
If we had a bizarre cast of characters, then Agent Coulson would be magnificent at the job – a grounding force to unite the on-the-edge hacker, the PTSD-torn veteran, the loopy scientists, and so forth.  He’d seem wise and noble because like Mal, someone has to hold this crew of malcontents together, and when he clashed with them it would be the same representation Mal served in Firefly: Mal/Coulson inevitably took the side of “the hard reality on the ground” and the crew inevitably takes the side of “our morals and ideals matter,” and in the end – shamed – the leader picks the right path between “what must be done” and “what makes us great.”
Except Coulson doesn’t have those choices.  We don’t care about his crew, who haven’t gotten a real spotlight to make us feel sympathy for them.  His choices are in service not of keeping an independent tradition alive, like Mal, but in hewing to a cold and callous bureaucracy.  And the people he’s fighting with aren’t people but mouthpieces.
I see what they’re trying to do here.  Agent Coulson was great when he could play off larger-than-life personas like Tony Stark, Thor, Captain America, being the dash of reality in their crazy antics.  And now he’s the dash of reality to a slurry of reality, a wry wink at a joke that wasn’t funny, and as such he’s rapidly losing appeal.