Agents of SHIELD pays lip service to Marvel movie continuity, and it’s had a handful of “big cameos”, that amounted to nothing but fan service.
It started out pretty dire, improved considerably by the end of its first season and into its second, but it’s leveled off.
It’s fine. It’s not great. It’s completely inessential to the movies—there are always justifications given for why these worlds are sort of walled off, but the second you give it any real thought it falls apart. You could always raise some of the same complaints with the movies themselves—“Why didn’t Thor fight in Civil War? Why didn’t so and so help blah blah blah?”—and again there are reasons, and again those reasons are flimsy. But the movies still give you some payoff with the crossovers, and it’s looking less and less like Agents of SHIELD ever will.
So if you get jaded with the failure of Marvel/Disney to make these stories matter to each other, SHIELD doesn’t have a whole lot to set itself apart from plenty of other perfectly fine shows. It’s got slicker production and a bigger budget than the CW superhero shows, but for quality I’d lump it right in there with Arrow and Flash.
The Netflix shows face all the same restrictions of theoretically being connected to the same universe, but only ever really interacting with each other. As mentioned, Daredevil starts off post-Avengers, pre-Age of Ultron. (I thought there was some reference in one of the later shows to Age of Ultron indicating that they’d sort of kept up with time passing in the Marvel movies, but I might be thinking of something from SHIELD, and it doesn’t actually matter either way.)
The differences with the Netflix shows are that it’s a little more plausible that the events of these shows would largely be unconnected to what SHIELD or Tony Stark or the Asgardians are doing anyway, and that the shows are mostly of a higher quality in their own right.
All four seasons (DD1, JJ1, DD2, LC1) of Netflix shows as of yesterday ranged from excellent to pretty good. Most dragged a little in the last half, but remain worth your time. Luke Cage stumbled the most in its second half, and if you’ve been in the Iron Fist thread you know early reviews for it aren’t encouraging. So maybe the Marvel/Netflix formula is wearing thin, but it’s been a fun ride so far, and I wouldn’t hesitate recommending them all. Just watch them in the order they aired.
Three more random observations:
The Netflix shows are darker and more violent than the movies or SHIELD. Nothing quite R-rated, but my sister is pretty sensitive to violence and she makes me watch the new seasons first and tell her which episodes have particularly violent fights. I think it suits the material, it never quite feels gratuitous, but you might want to know what you’re getting into.
The Netflix shows give us the second of the only two truly great Marvel villains we’ve seen on screen so far. Worth it for that alone.
The first two episodes of season one of Daredevil are excellent, and stand head and shoulders above the rest of the season and all the other shows; if they were combined as a movie would be better than at least half of the Marvel films. I think these were the two Steven S. DeKnight worked directly on before leaving as showrunner and just taking an executive producer credit on the series, and I will always wonder if the show could’ve been even better had he stuck around.