Holy smoke. If you haven't seen the new Marvel-Netflix series Jessica Jones, then do yourself a favor: stop whatever you're doing and stream the entire first season right now. If you're at work, you should probably just quit and go home to watch it -- unless you need the job to continue paying your Netflix bill so you can watch the show, in which case go straight home after work to see it. I can't fathom anyone watched this show and didn't recognize it as at least one of the best series today, regardless of whether it's to their personal taste. And rest assured, while I loved it and assert it is the best show on TV/streaming now, I realize the graphic nature of Jessica Jones will shock some viewers, particularly those used to Marvel's family-friendly PG-13 pictures. Nevertheless, it's utterly fantastic.
Marvel-Netflix previously paired up for the phenomenal and phenomenally successful Daredevil superhero TV show this summer. That show's ridiculously awesome, addiction episodes made it immediately the best superhero television series ever produced at the time, and -- as I said in my full review, which you can read here -- one of the greatest things Marvel has created so far. It became the most-streamed original content on Netflix, and the second-most pirated show online (a dubious distinction, but also a sign the series is hugely popular even among folks who don't have Netflix... yet).
Last month, Warner and CBS teamed up for the DC Comics superhero show Supergirl, which premiered to sky-high ratings and widespread praise. Supergirl joins The Flash to help form the top-tier of superhero genre TV, alongside Daredevil and Jessica Jones. Both Supergirl and The Flash are performing at respectable levels and making their networks happy -- CW has to be particularly pleased that their scarlet speedster placed third in its time slot this week, and Supergirl has bounced back a bit after having a couple of weeks worth of slides from the premiere's soaring viewership (yeah, another flying pun, ouch).
Despite rampant rumor-mongering among some online media and fan sites about what's going on over at Marvel lately (much of which I debunked in a recent article, which you can read here), it's safe to say Marvel Television is still rocking the ambition to become one of the finest creators of modern original TV content and aren't missing a beat. If the rest of their offerings continue to live up to the standards set by Daredevil and Jessica Jones, then at some point I'm going to write an article suggesting Marvel should just start their own branded network and run all of these shows, their various animated series, and then all of their old live-action and animated programming (Disney, just write 'em a check to get back all of that stuff, it'll be fun, trust me).
With rave reviews coming in and most audience reaction thus far being overwhelmingly positive, Jessica Jones should see strong audience numbers and go a very long way to winning Marvel a wider audience among different demographics that aren't typically represented in large numbers for the superhero genre. The latter point is particularly true if Marvel-Netflix promote the show heavily and smartly online via social media and mobile platforms, where more diverse demographics over-index.
Jessica Jones is tailored for binge-watching, which is probably exactly how you'll consume it once you see the pilot and get addicted. If you expect that at some point it will falter or cease continuing to up the ante and top each preceding episode, you'll be mistaken. It just keeps getting better, as Daredevil did.
There are so many revelations and slow-burns built into a complex web of storylines and subplots that constantly become entangled in ways you don't expect, you get pulled in deep and it's impossible to stop watching. The episodes are chapters in one long story, even more so than Daredevil or The Flash, so Jessica Jones is more like one giant 11 hr minute movie (episode lengths vary, but the average is 51.6 minutes, so it's actually 671 total minutes of viewing), each episode like a chapter in a novel with one single story arc.
Krysten Ritter tops anything else she's done thus far in her career, delivering an excellent and nuanced performance as a mean-spirited, cynical anti-hero who drinks too much and hurts people too often, but whose power of personality and charisma still make you emotionally invested in seeing her succeed at becoming the hero we believe she truly is somewhere deep down in her heart (but finding out whether we're correct in that belief is half the fun). Mike Colter as Luke Cage is equally perfect in his role and you'll be clamoring for Marvel and Netflix to hurry up and get the Luke Cage series in front of us as soon as possible.
Rachael Taylor as Patsy Walker (Jessica Jones' best friend) is so damn compelling she could just about have her own spinoff series. Eka Darville has one of the finest characters and arcs of any of the supporting cast, and his touching performance imbues what could've been a stock character with increasing revelations of depth.
Clarke Peters, familiar to fans of exceptional television via his beloved performances on The Wire and Treme, delivers again here with the sort of portrayal that nails precisely the likely reactions and attitudes of a cop working in a city full of increasingly inexplicable events. Will Traval's gives a wonderfully painful performance as an emotionally damaged, struggling ex-soldier-turned-cop.
Carrie Anne Moss has one of the hardest roles in the series, a character garnering equal measures sympathy and disdain from the audience. You will constantly guess and second-guess about her, and most of the time you'll wind up wrong. It's a fabulous balance and what I believe to be Moss' best performance on either the big or small screen. Likewise, Erin Moriarty stuns with a heartbreaking, unpredictably powerful turn with relatively limited visibility compared to the rest of the cast, but a great deal of weight to her every second on screen.
David Tennant creates one of the greatest villains of the genre, so good that even while you loath him the story doesn't ignore his emotional arc and personal skewed perception of himself and his motives. His Kilgrave (aka the Purple Man, in the comics) winds up on par with Loki and Kingpin in the top tier of the MCU's live-action villains to date.
The chemistry between Krysten Ritter and Mike Colter constantly generates tension and heat, and their relationship reaches levels of steaminess beyond anything else in mainstream superhero live-action entertainment so far -- there are full sex scenes, and they get explicit to the point this show would easily earn an R-rating if it played in theaters, just on the basis of the sex alone.
Which raises the point, in case I didn't make it clear enough earlier, that this isn't a show you can watch with your children, or with anyone who is embarrassed or bothered by graphic content. There's a lot of raw language, a lot of raw sex scenes, and an increasing amount of extremely disturbing violence (when someone gets dismembered, you see it shockingly up-close).
I'm not saying this show is amazing because of its graphic content. I'm saying the show is amazing, period, both because of and in spite of its graphic content, because at any given moment Jessica Jones is whatever it needs to be. Nothing is shoehorned in, nothing feels like it's serving an ulterior production motive (not even the mentions of other superheroes, which some fans or reviews will claim are just in service to promoting the larger MCU; but that's frankly a silly and lazy complaint in light of the fact this show takes place in a world where all those other heroes and events exist, so it would be ludicrous for people to not mention them sometimes).
It feels absurd to have to praise a show for treating women as regular human beings who can have lives and relationships and friendships that are written and performed as straightforwardly and normally as male characters' are treated in other productions. But that's the world we live in, where it's supposedly somehow harder to create good, relatable female characters -- particularly lead female characters -- as if the "trick" isn't to simply write them as regular people like anybody else, treating them with dignity and respect and unique goals and desires and expectations.
Film and television manage to recognize that men are human beings and write them accordingly, so it shouldn't be hard to do the same for women, and Jessica Jones proves that of course it's not hard to do it and do it incredibly well. Which isn't to say "it's not hard, so this show did nothing special," since doing it and doing it well are two very different things -- the fact men are assumed to be easy to write and relate to doesn't mean the shows and films dominated by men aren't sometimes terrible and often just of average or mediocre quality.
Everyone, male and female alike, is remarkably realized in Jessica Jones. People act like you'd expect people to act in situations. And their behavior creates an impression that they are still doing things when they walk off camera, that they had lives before we started watching and they'll continue to have lives when we aren't seeing them. Nobody feels like they exist merely in service of plot or some other character's arc. Series showrunner and primary writer Melissa Rosenberg has done brilliant work with this series, and she better get the recognition she deserves when awards time rolls around. Hopefully she will be involved in as many more Marvel projects as possible.
Watch it, and keep watching -- where it goes will surprise you, thrill you, terrify you, and leave you hungry for more. This, my friends, is perfect television.
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