Jessica Jones is a character that most people gloss over when they think of the pillars of the Marvel Universe, so it’s kind of crazy that she just got her own 13 episode TV show on Netflix. The character is very young compared to nearly every other property, but clearly she has a backstory that needs to be pushed out into the mainstream. Art should make us feel something by definition. Good art should start conversations as we share our thoughts, opinions, and feelings on the human experience. Jessica Jones does this in the best of ways, and one of its greatest factors is that it doesn’t feel preachy while it gives you its messages. The show is gritty and the presentation of the story is very adult, which is both a blessing, and in part a minor annoyance as it would be great to have these kinds of themes in it for a younger audience, an audience that needs to be exposed to some of these free-will concepts.
As an adaptation it’s a fairly solid work, of course, with some changes made. There was nothing there that didn’t make sense, in fact I would say that the choices made to adapt this story were exactly what was necessary to get a wider audience and at the same time, make the story believable, especially for people just not into super heroes. The story reveals are somewhat obvious, and it was certainly more the execution of the story line that came out as stellar. Casting was well handled with a cross over from Daredevil showing up to fit the show into the Netflix portion of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Acting was fairly solid throughout as well; Krysten Ritter turned out a great leading role, but although she shows a fair bit of range, I wish she’d been given more to show off that range. David Tennant was just fantastic, and in reading the reviews of this show from some mainstream writers, it’s pretty funny when you realize that people hadn’t seen him in Doctor Who. The difference in characters was fairly pronounced, but it was interesting to see how some of the choices on how to portray things stay the same between the two characters. Then again, the one constant is David Tennant, so why wouldn’t he act some of those things the same way?
Looking purely on the surface, the show is shot in New York, just like Daredevil, another Netflix show. It does that thing where the city is treated like a character in the story. We’re given locations within NY that we’re familiar with, and some not so much, but they don’t beat you over the head with it. They spent the extra money to film there, but didn’t act like show offs once they were there. They found a perfect balance on that count. There was the occasional film noir nod, in the way it was shot, the narration at the start, it had a lot of the tropes of a hardboiled detective story but we quickly lost that initial feel, so that it was more like an after-thought after the first episode. Still, they did stick with somethings elements of this, the 1940s soundtrack was there, and the Alias Detective Agency door was there throughout, but honestly, it spent most of its time broken so maybe not.
The cinematography of the series is as you’d expect, thinking outside the box, but within the panel, and then some. Jessica Jones produces those same classic comic book angles, creating story boards on the screen. Then they’ll bring subjects in or out of focus, something that wouldn’t be done in comics. It’s like comics recognized that TV and movies were being storyboarded via comic book-type artists, and so the one medium was feeding the other. The comic book response was to this was to give us very angled views of the world so that it seemed more like film noir within a comic book panel. In Jessica Jones, it’s like they’re taking back showing off what it can do, like MCs trying to out-do each other, as if to say, “your move comic books”.
Good science fiction will use its story as a way to say things that may be unpalatable to speak about directly. Star Trek would speak about racism by showing two seemingly similar characters with a black and a white face, but they were black on opposite sides of their face. They showed us how ridiculous the concept of racial color was. In Jessica Jones, the storyline deals with so many social issues, how we deal with rape, with post-traumatic stress disorder, mental health, how we look at group therapy, homelessness, drug and alcohol addiction, and finally our inability to engage others with our pains by throwing up a wall of tough, when we may be broken inside.
There is a rather ham-fisted attempt at addressing racism and homophobia by using ‘gifted’ as a euphemism for being different. They didn’t seem as committed on that as if it’s been done before and they’re only doing it to make sure the points were made. It’s good to include, but it felt out of place to the rest of the show. They linked the show to the ‘event’ from the Avengers Assemble section set in NY.
Kilgrave’s powers weren’t a direct parallel to alcoholism or drug abuse, but there was something there that connected these things. Within the show there was a great deal of concern over what happened to people who’d been pushed under Kilgrave’s spell. That there was a complete separation from the individuals to the actions they were performing. Kilgrave isn’t the addictive substance, he is an amalgam of the substances, and the situations people place themselves in to get those substances. I wouldn’t dwell too much on that part though, it was more the outcome of his effect that we looked at and how different people were effected differently. That group therapy even produced different individual goals and responses. It’s something we don’t see much in TV shows, but perhaps that is something that should be explored more as it’s usually the victims of crime that are forgotten.
Overall, a fantastic show, and one that I highly recommend to anyone who doesn’t mind not turning off their brain if they want to enjoy an action series. Having said that, it works on multiple levels, you can turn off as well, if that’s your thing.