Joss Whedon Talks New Characters For S.H.I.E.L.D. Series

Move over, Agent Hill! While promoting his new film, writer/director of "The Avengers" Joss Whedon had a chance to speak with MTV's Josh Horowitz about the in-development "S.H.I.E.L.D." series and what fans can expect to see.

First and foremost, Whedon says, new characters! One point of speculation among fans of the Marvel films and comics which feature the intelligence organization prominently is how big of a part the film characters would play on the small screen series. While Samuel L. Jackson's Nick Fury, Clark Gregg's Agent Coulson and Cobie Smulders' Agent Hill played pivotal roles in the summer feature, Whedon is insistent that additional characters are needed to truly flesh out the Marvel series.

"It needs to be its own thing. It needs to be adjacent [to the movies]," Whedon said. "You don’t want to do a show where you’re constantly going, ‘Iron Man just left, but he was totally here a minute ago.’ You want them to go off on their own thing, and say, well, what has S.H.I.E.L.D. got that the heroes don’t have? And part of that for me is, they’re not superheroes, but they live in that universe. That makes them a little bit — even though they’re a big organization — underdogs, and so that’s really interesting to me."

The director also noted that development of the series has gotten "very far," with the pitch to ABC including "a full framework, a full cast" though he declined to go into further detail.

Now, if only we can get a "Gotham Central" series in the works...