Internal pecking order.

Film The Daily Beast has an interview with Chloe Bennett who plays Skye ... sorry ... Daisy ... in MARVEL's Agents of SHIELD. It's hilariously unguarded, mainly talking about the process of trying to get work as an Asian actress in Hollywood, but the more interesting stuff, at least in terms of the internal politics of the MCU is about how the tv series fits within the world of the films. It doesn't:
"I think we’re all on the same page besides them,” Bennet says, sighing at the missed opportunity. “But they’re gonna do what they’re gonna do, and I’m really happy with our little show. We’ve been dealing with the topic of Civil War for a while now—at least, Daisy has. She’s a SHIELD agent but also a human and she’s completely torn."
Bless. Up until now there's been a sense of everything being connected and it's certainly felt that way in the past couple of seasons with the results of Hydra being revealed and the business with the helicarrier. I think "a human" is a mis-transcribing of inhuman incidentally. But it seems there films don't really have much interest in acknowledging the existence of the television series in any particular way which means it'll continue to feel slightly inessential.

It's forever been thus in comics with different creative teams ploughing forward with different storylines featuring the same characters.  The real trick here is the lack of continuity errors.  When something's established in the films it's reflected back on television and the films don't actively go out of their way to openly contradict what's being done on the small screen series.  Contrast this to the Whoniverse where no still has a fucking clue about how to reconcile Torchwood's Miracle Day.

We can all get a bit excited about what The Avengers:Infinity War films are going to look like assuming that it'll be stacked with cameos from across the MCU like some great superhero equivalent of Doctor Who's Journey's End with the SHIELD team wandering through at some point and The Defenders joining the fight the first film perhaps ending with the filmic equivalent of one of those epic splash pages with dozens of heroes fighting dozens of villains in cosmic scale.

But perhaps we should narrow our expectations a bit.  However much we want to see Mockingbird fighting alongside Black Widow or Hawkeye tipping his how towards Jessica Jones, it's probably going to be unlikely.  There's an internal pecking order even to production in the MCU and hierarchy of importance and all television may ever end up doing is reacting to whatever's happening in the films released each year.

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