Yesterday, at the Television Critics Association Press Tour, Netflix confirmed that its second Marvel live-action series, Jessica Jones will premiere later this year. It was also noted that Jessica Jones will have a different tone than Daredevil, but that doesn’t mean that the show won’t go into some dark territory.
Jessica Jones is based upon the lead character from Brian Michael Bendis and Michael Gaydos’ Alias, a mature readers comic book series that debuted from Marvel in 2001. In that series, Jessica Jones was a former superheroine turned private investigator who was dealing with the memory of her traumatic experience at the hands of a supervillain known as the Purple Man.
While speaking with Comic Book Resources, Jessica Jones showrunner Melissa Rosenberg said that the series “goes all the way dark. The tone that Brian Michael Bendis set is what attracted me to the project in the first place. It was very gritty and real and we just keep going with that.”
Marvel TV’s Jeph Loeb was quick to add “At the moment, there are no plans for us to tell an R-rated story. As we did with Daredevil, we encouraged Melissa to push as far against that envelope as we could. And look, we also had the benefit now of seeing that the Marvel brand could present something that would push the envelope the way that Daredevil did, and certainly in terms of the way that the language, in terms of the violence. This is different, though.”
Related: Netflix Teases Future Marvel Plans & Potential Punisher Spinoff
“Your definition of dark — for me, what’s dark is when a character will go in their own psyche,” said Rosenberg. “It’s not necessarily about stripping off clothes or pulling someone’s eye out. It’s about, how far can you let a character go? And I think that’s what attracted me about that, is that she can go to some very questionable places in her own psyche. And that, I think is, to me, the darkest.”
Loeb also noted that “the highest compliment that we’ve gotten so far — because so few people have actually seen it — was from Brian Bendis himself, who really felt that we had brought this to life in a way that was honest and compelling. And I think that speaks to the quality of the people that are — of the performances and at the same token, each of the scripts and the voices that they were given.”
Krysten Ritter stars in Jessica Jones as the title character, alongside Mike Colter as Luke Cage and former Doctor Who star, David Tennant as Kilgrave, the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s incarnation of the Purple Man. All 13 episodes will premiere on Netflix later this year.
Marvel fans, are you excited to hear that Jessica Jones won’t pull many punches? Share your opinions in the comment section below!
