Marvel Studios was separated from the wider Marvel Entertainment group as part of a corporate restructuring at Disney. Since then, explicit connections have become rarer.
But there was no way Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. could ignore the events of Avengers: Infinity War and Thanos' snap. Incredibly, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. season 6 - which should really be set a year into the Decimation era - will also ignore it.
The fundamental problem is that the relationship between Marvel Television and Marvel Studios isn't anywhere near so close as it used to be. What's more, Marvel Studios wanted to keep the plot of Avengers: Endgame a closely-guarded secret - to the extent that only Robert Downey Jr. read the entire script. There was no way they were going to reveal all the plot to television executives who were entirely unconnected to the movie.
All this means that Marvel Television simply didn't know enough about what was due to happen in Avengers: Endgame in order to tie into it. They couldn't set post-Endgame MCU. As a result, Jeph Loeb recently confirmed that he considers all Marvel Television shows to be set before Thanos' snap.
For the most part, this isn't a problem. Whedon explained, "But we certainly don’t want to burden the audience of telling them all that. We just want them to enjoy the ride and let the couch discussions be about that." Unfortunately, in a universe where everything is supposed to be connected somehow, that probably isn't possible.
This is all pretty disappointing, not least because Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. could have served an important function in the MCU. Although the snap affected half the life in the universe, the Russo brothers chose to focus in upon people viewers know and love. The true scale and horror of what Thanos had accomplished wasn't really demonstrated. The closest Marvel Studios came to it was an official tie-in novel that was clearly set some time after the snap, but avoided spoiling anything. No doubt Marvel Studios found it much easier to carefully control the information they gave to a single author and his editor than to Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.'s team of writers and producers. And so an entire five-year period in the history of the MCU will essentially go unexplored, and the scale of the Avengers' victory will never truly be understood. That needn't have been the case; it would have just required a lot closer cooperation between Marvel Studios and Marvel Television.
Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. season 6 premieres on Friday, May 10 on ABC.
