Disney has announced a big programming deal: They will produce 60 hours (!) of Marvel superhero-based shows for Netflix. These will hit the…uh, streamwaves, I guess, some time in 2015. Netfix is one of several services, along with Amazon and Hulu, dipping their toes in a big way into original programming. This is clearly Marvel’s biggest and most ambitious TV deal yet, even taking Agents of SHIELD into account.
Cannily, the model for the proposed skein of programs seems to be the Marvel movies. Introduce various characters in their own standalone projects, build a sense of a connected world, and then bring them together for an epic team-up. Here the idea is for four discrete 13 hour shows built around a different superhero—Daredevil, Jessica Jones, Iron Fist and (yay!) Luke Cage—who then will team up in a capping mini-series called The Defenders.*
[*The Defenders was a venerable Marvel team book dating back to the ‘70s, with the core of the team being Dr. Strange, the Hulk and Namor. Luke Cage was briefly a member on retainer back in his Hero for Hire days. Still, not much of a link.]
The first announcement came maybe a week ago, and already names are being floated for producers of Daredevil (the first series) and Jessica Jones. The setting of all the heroes in New York’s violent slum Hell’s Kitchen would seem to indicate that much of the inspiration for the programs will derive from the work of comics writer Brian Michael Bendis. Back in the early 2000s he created Jessica Jones for a book called Alias, and also used these other heroes quite a bit.
For instance, he made Luke Cage, then without his own title and floundering in superhero limbo, a recurring character in Daredevil’s book (which Bendis wrote at the time). Meanwhile, Iron Fist, a ‘70s martial arts character as Cage was original a ‘70s blaxploitation ones, has for several decades now (in real life time) been Cage’s partner in Heroes for Hire.
Bendis, an obvious Cage fan, eventually brought Cage into the Avengers when he started writing that book. In doing so, he turned Cage into a higher profile and more popular character than he’d ever been before. Eventually Jessica and Cage had a kid and then later got married, so all the characters tie together nicely.
Of course, when doing a show or movie based on a superhero, the first thing to do is to figure out what version of the character you want to present. You need to appeal to the fanboys, but also to the people out there who don’t read comics, since there are a lot more of those. Marvel has been markedly more successful at this than DC / Warners lately.
The trick is to boil down a character’s often insanely convoluted continuity—Cage for instance has been around nearly 40 years now, Daredevil nearly 50 years—into a story that can be told in a handful of hours. The best approach for this, I think, is to worry less about the current version of character, and more about a streamlined, back to basics approach. Again, Marvel’s been pretty successful at that in their various movies.
As an example, the Sony Spider-Man movies Sam Raimi made started with Mary Jane Watson, reconfigured to be Peter Parker’s neighbor since childhood, as the object of Peter’s longtime secret crush. In the comics, by that point Mary Jane and Peter had been married for years and years (real life time again, since Marvel character don’t really age.) Of course, more recently that marriage and all memory of it was erased when Peter made a literal deal with Satan to save Aunt May’s life.
Comics, everyone.
The point being, the movies (and TV shows) by nature are aiming at much, much wider audiences than those who regularly or currently read comics. And so we see Peter and Mary Jane’s romantic relationship begin and then blossom in the films.
As childhood friends in Raimi’s films, Mary Jane’s relationship with Peter goes back a lot farther than in the comics, when the two met when Peter was (I think) in college. And that’s cool, because you can see the reasons for the changes, and moreso because they didn’t really alter anything essential in Peter or Mary Jane’s characters, or in their fundamental relationship.
In the comics, Cage has currently been an Avenger for a while, thus fighting alongside major league superheroes like Thor and Iron Man against world-threatening foes. He and Jessica, again, are married and have a kid. Etc. He’s come a long, long way from working in a seedy, cockroach-ridden office above a broken down old movie theater.
However, given the structure of interconnected but largely standalone shows, I’d say you’d want to backtrack on that and get at least part way back to simpler (and also less expensive) versions of the characters. Having Cage be an Avenger doesn’t really make sense. If you want that version of the character, put him instead into the big screen Avengers movies.
And so here, I would think, Cage and Iron Fist would again be street-level Heroes for Hire, or perhaps meet and partner up for the first time in their respective series. Matt Murdock, Daredevil, well, he’s fine. He’s never strayed much from his original characterization. Indeed, he’s been remarkably stable for a superhero. He’s had highs and lows and different girlfriends and so on, but basically he’s never strayed far from where he started.
Jessica Jones started as a young woman who had a short-lived career as an Avenger, had a particularly scarring run-in with a supervillain, and soon after dropped out of the capes trade. Quite messed up by her experiences, she became a somewhat seedy, bargain basement and generally self-loathing private eye whose cases only occasionally involved the superpowered classes. Mostly her book was about a woman tortured by her past and vast doubts who tried to make her way in a world well below the radar of often god-like beings like the Avengers.
Indeed, Jessica’s own superpowers—a degree of superstrength and durability, and flight, although she was never very good at the latter—seldom came into play. (She did beat holy hell out of the super-strong Man Mountain Marko one time, a guy who back in the day gave Cage and Spider-Man runs for their money.) She was one of the Pete Bests of the superhero world.
So backtrack to the days when Jessica wasn’t married to Cage, maybe before they were even ‘dating.’ Bendis’ Cage was originally a player—indeed, a very busy ‘cape chaser’ out to nail as many superhero chicks as he could—and he and Jessica hooked up more than had any sort of real emotional bond. As with the rest of the book, their initial relationship was relentlessly unromanticized.
Again, I can’t see Disney / Netflix taking things that far, but as with Peter and Mary Jane in the Spider-Man movie, you can definitely see them setting the characters further back in continuity. Jessica would not yet not a mom or (as I think she is, in the comics now) once again plying the superhero game. She might well once again be a rather damaged, markedly unglamorous private detective. *
[*One question is whether they will want to really portray Jessica as this messed up, given that it might send the ‘wrong message’ about womyn and such. And also how far Disney wants to go with the ‘gritty’ thing. Again, I’m not saying this has to be super-gritty and grim, but instead that we should see the Marvel universe from street level rather than from a helicarrier.]
As a side note, although Bendis has a lot of critics (and there definite flaws as well as great strengths in Bendis’ writing), he can do a gag with the best of them. Back when Spider-Man was an Avenger with Luke Cage–and wearing an awful new costume–his then wife Mary Jane sees Jessica and Luke’s baby for the first time and naturally gets a small dose of Baby Fever. (“And here we go,” Peter says, seeing this.) A bit later we get this panel:
See, Mary Jane’s sudden emergent Baby Fever is setting off Peter’s danger warning Spider-Sense. Now, that’s funny. It’s ever funnier because it’s in the back of the panel and the joke isn’t calling attention to itself.
So back to how the Netflix shows might work. Cage and Iron Fist are more or less neighborhood Heroes for Hire (or, again, would be seen forming their partnership), a profession not too far from where Jessica is at, but more explicitly selling their superpowers as opposed to more mundane skills. But intersections of their work can easily be envisioned.
Matt Murdock, of course, is a lawyer. Again, it’s not hard to see how these characters would eventually tie in together. Matt as a lawyer could hire Jessica to work on a case, which ties a client into a shadowy figure who’s been giving Cage and Iron Fist problems….
Assuming they are largely working from Bendis’s stuff back in the early 2000s, along with the programs’ shared Hell’s Kitchen setting, one can expect the tones of these shows to be at least fairly gritty and noir-ish. Not that there can’t or won’t be humor in them, but they will probably reflect a grubbier side of the sparkly, super high tech world we’ve seen in the Avengers movies or the increasingly moribund Agents of SHIELD. You don’t want to make the shows unpleasant to watch, certainly, but these heroes will presumably not be dealing with alien invasions or marauding Norse demi-gods.
Moreover, all these characters are thus perfectly scaled to a television level presentation. Of course, nerds wouldn’t be nerds if they couldn’t bitch. I’ve already heard at least a few grousing that now Daredevil won’t be returning to the silver screen. (Utterly ignoring the fact, of course, that television in large has been significantly better than the movies have for a decade or more.)
This is blinkered thinking. If any character in the Marvel stables is perfectly set up to appear on TV, it’s Daredevil. His powers are low-level enough to portray without a special effects budget running into the tens of millions. He doesn’t have a private jet or laser guns or any other fancy gear; his weapon of choice is a folding baton. And he’s a lawyer, one of the most venerable of all serial television professions.
As is, of course, the private eye, so Jessica Jones fits that bill as well. Cage and Iron Fist, meanwhile, well, think of them along the lines of the Equalizer or the like. Is a pyrokinetic punk shaking your corner grocery down for protection money? Heroes for Hire at your service.
With Marvel seemingly in the process of muffing their big ticket Agents of SHIELD show—the program, from what I hear, is entirely too reticent to tie itself into a broader Marvel universe than the one presented in the Avengers and the movies leading up to it—this is undoubtedly Marvel’s best next opportunity to radically expand that world in a new and interesting way.
Excelsior!
