★★★★☆ Whole lot of boinking goin on

Jessica Jones (2015-2019)

Melissa Rosenberg, Netflix, Marvel

Jessica Jones is the Marvel Netflix series that followed Daredevil. Like Daredevil, it consists of three seasons of 13 50 min episodes each. It is not as good as Daredevil, I am sorry to say.

The big problem is Jessica herself, who makes a point of being as obnoxious to everyone around her as she possibly can be. But it is not Jessica alone. Very few of the main characters are people it is easy to like. This is especially true of the female main characters. Obnoxious as Jessica is, she shines compared to the women surrounding her: her stepsister Trish Walker, her stepmother Dorothy Walker, her sometimes lawyer Jeri Hogarth, and her biological mother Alisa Jones.

Surprisingly, some of the men are more-or-less decent human beings: Jessica's neighbor Malcolm Ducasse, her building superintendent Oscar Arocho, and her later colleague/hookup Erik Gelden. It is true that when we first meet Malcolm he is an addict, that Oscar is a forger, and Erik a blackmailer. Nevertheless they are basically decent. We also meet another powered hero, Luke Cage (to whom the next series belongs), and he, too, is an OK human.

The two main villains, I am sorry to say, were not that interesting. Villain number one, Kilgrave, is played by David Tennant, an actor I have seen far too much of. He always plays men who are very, very pleased with themselves, and I have unavoidably and unfairly soaked up the impression that Tennant himself is like that. The final villain, Sallinger, is just not that interesting -- he's just your common or garden variety psychopath.

In my opinion, the best character in the show is Jeri Hogarth. She's a scheming lawyer, not entirely unprincipled, but of flexible ethics. She has her own problems. Jeri is basically an awful person who you would not like in real life, but as a character in a drama, she's pretty interesting.

The story consists in very large part of painful psychodrama conversations. For me, that got old. As always, YMMV. It does manage a nicely suspenseful ending for the last few episodes of Season 3.

Jessica Jones on IMDB

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