‘Marvel’s Jessica Jones’:
Former superhero is cloaked in noir in Netflix series.
Noir and sci-fi are hardly strange bedfellows, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy to put them together on television: What’s immediately credible in the pages of a Marvel comic book may be a stretch when you trade real actors for colored ink and speech balloons.
That’s one of the reasons that “Marvel’s Jessica Jones” is an effective thriller: As you’ll see when the 13-episode first season becomes available on Netflix on Friday, Nov. 20, creator Melissa Rosenberg walks a dangerously fine line balancing the two genres in the same show.
Except for the fact that she used to be a superhero, Jessica (Krysten Ritter) could have been created by Raymond Chandler or Dashiell Hammett. Hard-bitten, dry, cynical
and rarely without a bottle of cheap booze on her desk or at her bedside, she works out of a run-down office with cardboard standing in for the busted window in her door. She’s a brilliant private eye, but living from hand to mouth isn’t easy, so she’s often pushing her way into the well-appointed legal offices of Jeri Hogarth (Carrie-Ann Moss) begging for a case.
Something always seems to be eating her, the hound of her particular hell always nipping at her heels. Bit by bit, we learn that she’s running away from her own past and, in particular, a manipulative maniac named Kilgrave (David Tennant) who is supposed to be dead.
During a particularly dry period, Jessica seems to luck out when a pair of Midwestern parents hire her to find their daughter, Hope (Erin Moriarty), who’s gone missing in New York. Not an unusual plot element for a detective story, but Jessica quickly realizes that the girl’s disappearance has all the earmarks of something Kilgrave would pull off. And not just because he’s a maniac: He’s trying to get to Jessica herself. They have a history, and it’s not pretty.
If this were a broadcast series, Rosenberg would be required to establish Jessica’s superhero status with a bunch of over-plotted feats in the first episode. But “Jessica Jones” steams along as a gripping noir thriller before we see much of Jessica’s powers, and when we do, it’s almost ho-hum, compared with most superhero shows: She lifts a car off the ground to keep a scumbag from driving away so she can serve him with court papers. No biggie, really, and that’s intentional.
The gradual establishment of Jessica’s superhero past enables Rosenberg to solidify the complexity of her deeply flawed character. We get the idea that even if her brief career as a superhero hadn’t ended in tragedy, Jessica would have been almost as much of a hard case as she is when we meet her. She goes incommunicado from her best friend, talk show host Trish Walker (Rachael Taylor), spends hours drinking on her fire escape and spying on people doing all kinds of randy things in the building across the street, is paranoid about anyone who wants to hire her and has no hesitation tumbling into bed with bartender Luke Cage (Mike Colter), despite the fact he seems to be in a relationship already. She knows because she’s been watching him have sex with another woman from her perch on the fire escape.
She’s also tough as nails, intensely sexual and smarter than anyone else in any room. She may be fueled by cynicism and self-loathing, but that just makes her stronger.
Setting and design contribute greatly to the show’s credibility. While the dialogue and elements of the performances, especially Ritter’s, are rooted in the series’ comic book side, the streets of New York’s Hell’s Kitchen are gritty and real — not at all stylized in a “Gotham”-like manner.
Ritter is an appealing heroine, but doesn’t consistently exhibit the gravitas of an antiheroine like Jessica Jones. That comes into greater clarity when she shares scenes with Colter, who more easily balances his role as another character with special powers. By the way, Luke Cage will get his own Netflix series down the road.
Tennant is pure comic book from the minute we finally meet him. We hear his voice at first, and then catch fleeting glimpses of Kilgrave, but the character doesn’t fully arrive for a while. The Tennant we know from the brilliant “Broadchurch” series is closer to the unrepentant cynic that Jessica Jones is supposed to be. Here, he’s closer to Jack Nicholson’s Joker, or any number of over-the-top villains from superhero comic book films and TV shows. The exaggerated performance works because Tennant is good, but it also works because Rosenberg has taken her time introducing him.
The series isn’t perfect. To be honest, it drags a bit and seems repetitive, as though Rosenberg is stretching things out to increase audience tension. In fact, you’re likely to feel the opposite from time to time, a desire to say, “Oh, get on with it.”
But stick with it. “Jessica Jones” may only have a dark side, but that’s one reason it works well on Netflix but never would have passed muster on broadcast TV.