A few months ago I jotted down some notes after watching all of the Netflix Daredevil show. I think I posted it for a few minutes and took it down, because I felt like my thoughts were incomplete. So now, after watching all of the new Marvel-for-Netflix Jessica Jones show, I have some more thoughts. <\/p>\n
Here is a copy-paste of my original Daredevil thoughts:<\/p>\n
– The first handful of episodes had such a cinematic style to them that I haven’t really seen on TV. Certain scenes played out in a way that was totally above the normal show-and-tell of routine television storytelling. The one scene that comes to mind is where the blind Chinese guy is in the car and the camera does that slow 360 pan around with Daredevil appearing on the second rotation. Totally unnecessary, but totally thrilling to set a cinematic mood and visual myth-making for the Daredevil character. <\/p>\n – Much of the dialog in Daredevil pulls back from that to-do-list-style dialog of other superhero shows, or any show for that matter. A lot of the dialog is there just for ambiance, whereas other shows (like Arrow and Agents of Shield) use dialog primarily to move us from point A to B. Instead, a good portion of our understanding of character motivation in Daredevil actually comes from the acting and the framing of shots! This is a technique of storytelling that almost never happens on TV. I was so impressed by this for the first several episodes, and wondered if they’d be able to keep up that level of writing\/directing for the entire season. Well, they weren’t really able to, but I wasn’t really let down since the thing as a whole was so entertaining.<\/p>\n – That rote style of TV storytelling began to seep in as the show went on, which seemed inevitable I guess. The show did maintain a pretty high level of dialog and acting throughout. The bravado, auteur-ish directing seemed to disappear into a more workman-style functionality – with a few impressive flourishes scattered throughout. Still a super satisfying watch overall. I gotta say though, I felt really thrilled by the groundedness of those early episodes. As things began to unravel into Marvel mythology stuff, I lost a bit of my enthusiasm (the ninja fight). <\/em><\/p>\n ———<\/p>\n Maybe I need to re-watch the first 4 eps of Daredevil. I’m not sure how rose-tinted my glasses are. My memory is that it used cinematic storytelling in a way that almost felt revolutionary for television. Then it mostly devolved into normal radio-play writers-room style television (still fun and mostly great!), but now I’ve created a standard in my head for Netflix Marvel shows to shoot higher than Agents of Shield-style expositional dialog dumps. <\/p>\n Jessica Jones is all exposition – which sort of makes sense since it’s set up with a voice-over film noir framework. My problem with film noir tropes is that we’ve long since evolved from the need for that style of conveying information. Films like the Long Goodbye took the genre into new ambiguous territory, where the camera was telling us more than the dialog. At least that’s my memory of the Long Goodbye. It’s been a while! Most recently, Inherent Vice executed the noir genre in an abundantly cinematic and dark\/funny way. <\/p>\n I guess I went in with expectations about these Netflix hero shows exceeding the minimal visual language used to tell stories on TV (typically) – but because of production pipelines and the amount of episodes they have to produce, it’s easy to see why writers rule over auteurs in general. This is the case with Jessica Jones. <\/p>\n All of the high praise I’m seeing for Jessica Jones is for the performances and the boldness of the writing to take Marvel characters into a dark moral swamp; exploring rape, drug addiction, mental illness etc… Which is all interesting stuff, but probably wouldn’t compel me to write a blog post about it unless there was something else going on that I hadn’t seen in other TV productions. There are tons of well written shows that cover layered moral territory: Mad Men, Breaking Bad, the Sopranos I guess? I never watched the Sopranos. <\/p>\n The performances are mostly great, and I love love David Tennant’s over the top acting. I loved him on Doctor Who also. But I’m not going to write about Doctor Who, because once again, it’s just generic entertaining television (with a spark of refreshing sci-fi optimism).<\/p>\n So what do I want from a show? Well, nothing really. I’m fine with Jessica Jones being what it is. I was entertained by it (with the exception of the shaky third act involving the unstable super-soldier B story which was silly and distracting), but it wasn’t a step forward in any way for the medium. Maybe for Marvel adaptations. <\/p>\n What perked my senses were those first 4 or so episodes of Daredevil that made me think Netflix was going to set some new standard for TV shows, and genre TV at that! Ultimately they didn’t, but I think it’s true that the language of cinema is slowly seeping its way into television. There were glimpses of it in both seasons of True Detective, despite the second season being a complete ramshackle mess. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A few months ago I jotted down some notes after watching all of the Netflix Daredevil show. I think I posted it for a few minutes and took it down, because I felt like my thoughts were incomplete. So now, after watching all of the new Marvel-for-Netflix Jessica Jones show, I have some more thoughts. 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