One of the cool things about Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. is that it has managed to supplement the narrative blanks left by the films while still being completely its own thing. Throughout the course of the MCU’s decade-long history, the show always made it a point to connect to the films. Early seasons connected to films like Captain America: The Winter Soldier and Avengers: Age of Ultron. Season 5 ended with a bang as it directly referenced Thanos’ invasion of Wakanda during Avengers: Infinity War. Sadly, it looks like this connectivity ends with Avengers: Endgame, according to Marvel TV head Jeph Loeb.

It’s just the safest way for us to do things. Just looking at it from a very practical place, which is, what the world looked like post-snap, [it] was not something we had seen yet. We were already shooting. We don’t want to ever do something in our show which contradicts what’s happening in the movies. The movies are the lead dog. They’re setting the timeline for the MCU and what’s going on. Our job is to navigate within that world. The only way for us to tell our story is to do them pre-snap. Whether or not you can figure out [how the timeline works], we’ll let ‘timelords’ figure out.

Showrunner Jed Whedon reiterated that it was a matter of scheduling as they didn’t know when the season was premiering at the time of its writing and filming.

If they moved us up by two months and we based our show on [‘Endgame’s’] storyline, then all of a sudden we’d burn down a huge story point for them. So we had to dodge all of that.

Avengers: Endgame may be the first MCU film to directly deal with time travel but the first to actually incorporate it in the MCU was Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. during the last season. When asked about whether some of the show’s time-travel shenanigans overlap with the film’s multiverse theory, Whedon had this to say.

We have a logic in our head that makes sense, 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.

Source: The Wrap