Adam Graham's Blog: Christians and Superheroes - Posts Tagged "netflix"

Daredevil is on his way to television screens... those that can stream Netflix anyway. The report:

Marvel once again makes a move that could only further its dominance over TV and films. In a surprise gamble Marvel has announced that they've joined forces with Netflix to produce and distribute four new Marvel live action TV shows. Each show will focus on different street level heroes from the Marvel Universe, namely Daredevil, Iron Fist, Jessica Jones and Luke Cage. Each series will culminate in a miniseries event featuring the joining of the heroes to form The Defenders.

If you're wondering who Jessica Jones is, she made her first appearance in 2001, so is far more recent than the guys who date back to the 1960s and 70s.

The series are bad news on one front at least: This makes the likelihood of a Daredevil movie reboot less likely.

Will I like it? I don't know. At this point, the early description makes me think that this will be much more to Frank Miller's liking than mine:

Each series will be based mostly in Hell's Kitchen, New York and will focus on the gritty and dark nature of the street level heroes, whereas The Marvel cinematic universe focuses on the billionaires, geniuses and demigods. Netflix has committed to at least 13 episodes for each of the four shows, with the option to extend the episode count.

If true, I'm not particularly interested. Don't get me wrong, I could be okay with stories with a dark element. After all, like many kids of my generation I grew up on Batman: The Animated Series. But what made that series work was that while Batman was that while Batman had his problems, this was really good v. evil.

My first reaction to reading this is that it feels like its going to be a Marvel version of Arrow a series I watched one episode of and quit. During the first episode our "hero" killed several people including killing one person just to keep his secret identity safe even though it wasn't particularly at risk. If that's the case, I'm really not interested.

There are legitimate reasons to be concerned that Marvel could go there particularly with the Jennifer Jones character whose solo comic series was based in the Marvel MAX imprint for explicit content. And one appeal to going direct Netflix is that you can be edgy and explicit as you want and no network censors to complain. Indeed, many Netflix originals are rated TV-MA. Also, is it me or do most of these new streaming TV shows have ratings of TV-Y or TV-MA with nothing in between.

There is some TV-MA Marvel material on Netflix but these are motion comics and anime.

To me, I hope they don't go totally dark with these characters. Not only wouldn't I watch the shows, it'd end up being bad business for them in the long run. If they don't create something that can capture fans of The Avengers movie, it's not going to be worth it to Netflix in the long run. In addition to that, both Luke Cage and Iron Fist are featured on the Ultimate Spider-man animated series and they'd be tossing away in any attempt to parlay that if they go TV-M or all dark via Green Arrow.

I also have to say their reimagining of the Marvel team, The Defenders with these characters is interesting to say the least. The original defenders were headed up Dr. Strange with the Hulk and Namor the Submariner, soon to be joined by the Silver Surfer. This team will have none of those characters, so that's definitely a reinvention, though the Defenders were always an odd group that I'm not really interested and they'll have to see if they can make the Netflix show more interesting.

How bad or how good these programs are is something we'll find out come 2015.