Nicolas Cage voicing a Depression-era Spider-Man detective was always going to get attention. What's interesting now is the company he's keeping.

Collider put together a list of the best superhero shows clocking in under 40 episodes, and Spider-Noir, Cage's noir riff on Peter Parker as down-and-out sleuth Ben Reilly, sits right at the top of the conversation. The show runs well under ten episodes, shot in a style that flips between full colour and black-and-white, and leans hard into femme fatales and rain-slicked alleys instead of the usual cape theatrics. It's a quick watch, and according to Collider, that's exactly the point.

The list isn't just about brevity for its own sake. It's making an argument that some of the medium's best work happens when a show doesn't have room to pad itself out.

Green Lantern: The Animated Series gets singled out as maybe the best Green Lantern adaptation going, a three-dimensional animated series that sent Hal Jordan and Kilowog into deep space and, along the way, built out fan favourites like the reformed Red Lantern Razer and the AI Aya discovering her own origins. It never got the audience it deserved on TV, but its reputation has only grown since.

The Spectacular Spider-Man shows up too, praised for modernising Spidey's early comic runs while still carving its own identity, with Josh Keaton's Peter Parker balancing a messy personal life against an even messier secret identity. It got cancelled early. Fans still bring it up as one of the tightest Spider-Man adaptations on record.

Then there's WandaVision, which Collider frames as part superhero love story and part supervillain origin story, Wanda Maximoff and a resurrected Vision playing house in a fabricated sitcom America before things go sideways. The list stretches the definition a little by folding in Agatha All Along, Vision Quest, and even Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness as direct follow-ons, and still lands the whole stretch of story under 40 episodes combined.

Agent Carter rounds things out, a two-season ABC spin-off from Captain America: The First Avenger that put Peggy Carter at the centre of Hydra-hunting espionage inside the Strategic Scientific Reserve, the outfit that eventually became S.H.I.E.L.D. It's lighter on capes, heavier on spycraft, and the list makes room for it anyway.

What ties all of this together isn't the genre, it's the runtime discipline. None of these shows overstayed. Spider-Noir wrapped its story instead of stretching for a second season nobody asked for. Agent Carter got cut short and still built a cult following on what it managed to say in two seasons. WandaVision, whatever you think of its ending, told a complete story and then let other shows carry the aftermath.

With Marvel and DC both still deciding how many series a single universe can support before audiences tune out, that restraint is starting to look less like an accident and more like a lesson worth relearning.