'Jessica Jones': Here's The Best Marvel Superhero On TV
Deep into Marvel’s Jessica Jones, the new Netflix series whose13 episodes begin streaming on Friday, a character describes the title hero as “a hard-drinking, short-fused mess of a woman,” and by the standards of TV women, this is a breakthrough compliment. It’s not often that women are allowed to be as tough, flawed, and imposing as private-eye/super-hero Jessica Jones is in this Marvel Comics adaptation, and these qualities — combined with a terrific performance by Krysten Ritter — immediately places Jones at the top of the Marvel TV-character heap.
Based on a character developed by Brian Michael Bendis and Michael Gaydos, Jessica Jones is about a New York City woman who possesses special powers, yet has walked away from a super-hero career to lead a pretty crummy life as a low-level private investigator. Initially in the seven episodes made available to critics, Ritter’s Jessica is a bit of a film noir cliché, always sullen and hardboiled-sarcastic, always shrouded in shadows, always accompanied by moody jazz trumpet music on her drunken walks down those mean streets.
But pretty quickly, Jessica Jones, as overseen by producer Melissa Rosenberg (who wrote the screenplays for the Twilight movies and was a head writer on Dexter), shapes up as a tense portrait of a woman who’s fated with bad luck but who perseveres with a wisecrack and a vicious punch. (Jones’ super-powers manifest primarily as extraordinary strength, and it’s one example of the show’s success that it immediately convinces you that the slender Ritter is believable tossing men three times her size across a room.)
Jones’s primary adversary other than her own bad life-choice instincts is Kilgrave, another possessor of powers — mind control — played with malicious yet never campy exuberance by David Tennant. Jones’s primary ally is another well-known Marvel character, Luke Cage, played by The Good Wife’s Mike Colter in a role that requires him to be a tough guy, a sensitive guy, and a shirt-ripped-off sex symbol, and Colter pulls off all three characteristics with impressive ease.
Jessica Jones works very well as an action-adventure show, but it does another significant thing: It presents a number of relationships between women that are not male-defined. In addition to Jessica’s complex friendship with a radio talk-show host played by Rachel Taylor, what initially seems like a glancing sub-plot involving Carrie-Anne Moss as Jeri Hogarth, a lawyer who occasionally employs Jessica, turns into an interesting exploration of Hogarth’s impending divorce from her wife, and her affair with her assistant, Pam.
There was a flurry of publicity about how sexually explicit Jessica Jones is after its pilot screened at New York Comic Con in October, but that just suggests how fanboy-immature not just fanboys can be. Jessica Jones proves, as its hours proceed, to be one of the more thoughtful meditations on what it means to be a super-hero, and how Stan Lee’s “great responsibility” mantra can prove to be a deadly curse.
Marvel’s Jessica Jones starts streaming Friday on Netflix.
