I enjoyed WandaVision while I was watching it, and still would today. However, Falcon and the Winter Soldier far exceeds WandaVision. The gravity of the show caught me off guard. While the MCU is usually a fairly formulaic "good guys defeat bad guys" movie with a good dose of comedy and occasional serious drama, this series represents a huge tonal shift compared to what I was used to. The MCU universe is typically portrayed as something of a picturesque reality where the good guys always triumph and everyone lives happily ever after. Leave it to Hollywood to not accurately represent their source material, and the comics, although they did have good defeats evil themes throughout, the comic writers were sure to write real-world problems into their comics, and that's something that was mostly notably absent in previous MCU entries.

Starting largely with Captain America: Civil War, the heroes start having to face repercussions for their actions, and sometimes they're not always forces for good. This idea is represented tremendously in Falcon and the Winter Soldier. Although the heroes saved the day in Avengers: Endgame, there are real-world consequences to suddenly bringing back half of the planet's population after they were missing for five years. In those five years after the Snap, although they were bad, people that were otherwise enemies joined forces, and countries and their people joined together in grief over their lost loved ones and sought to rebuild the world and make it better. The Avengers bringing everyone back essentially returned everything back to the way it was before, and suddenly the same problems that people thought were gone are staring them in the face again: racism is a thing, countries hating each other is a thing again, and it's like the Snap and the five following years, along with all of the rebuilding that came during that time, never happened. The problems portrayed in this series are very reminiscent of real life, something that was lacking in previous MCU entries.

The title of Captain America is one with a hugely complicated history, the Flag Smashers are supposed to be the bad guys but their intentions are, at their base, good, and things are very far from being perfect following the actions of the Avengers in Avengers: Endgame. There is so much grey area with morality in this series, I struggle with whether or not I should root for one character or another, and I love every second of it. I highly recommend this to people that enjoy the MCU and wouldn't mind quite a bit of realism poured into it for good measure.