Melissa Rosenberg, Drew Goddard Named as Writers on Daredevil, Jessica Jones Shows
Excelsior!
Marvel is moving much more quickly on its putative Netflix series than it has on some other TV projects in its history, and has already named writers for two of them, Drew Goddard on Daredevil and Melissa Rosenberg on Jessica Jones. Rosenberg’s involvement is particularly exciting as she was involved in a previous effort at getting a Jessica Jones series (pictured above, clocking Doctor Doom with a fire hydrant) to screen, one that sounded like it was shaping up pretty well. (Also, Carol Danvers was in it.)
Goddard doesn’t seem like too bad a choice either. The Cabin in the Woods, Lost, Alias, Angel, and Buffy veteran is a big Daredevil fan, at least according to an interview with Collider:
You’re talking to a guy who had quotes from Daredevil painted on his walls growing up. When I was 18 I still had the blood-red door with the ‘I have shown him that a man without hope is a man without fear,’ that was what I love.
But lets talk about what we know about Rosenberg’s previous attempt at adapting Jessica Jones for the smalls screen. It seems almost as if this might be a continuation of the same project: before Agents of SHIELD was even announced, Rosenberg was talking about how her series would sit within the continuity of the current Marvel movies. The last word on it was that it wasn’t happening right away, but that “Marvel is trying to set it up somewhere else. They’re looking at a lot of different possibilities.” One of those possibilities was, apparently, Netflix.
As for that pilot as it was originally written, it contained not just Jones and her long-time flame Luke Cage, but also a certain fan favorite that everybody has a particular actress in mind for.
I had Jessica Jones and Luke Cage and Carol Danvers [for the pilot script]. Basically, I wanted those three guys — then I would have a series. Everyone else we can be digging into lesser known characters or taking known characters and renaming them.
Jones is a former Marvel universe superhero. After undergoing a pretty significantly traumatic experience in her superhero identity Jewel, she decided to quit the superheroing life and open a private detective agency to get away from the superhero community for a while, but her cases tend to bring her back into it. She has strong relationships with Luke Cage (her husband and the father of her daughter, though not in that order), Danny Rand (Iron Fist, who is also getting his own series), and Carol Danvers (formerly Ms. Marvel, now Captain Marvel). Rosenberg has talked before about how Jones’ past informs her story:
Jessica Jones is actually a former superhero with PTSD, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. My psychologist father-in-law said, ‘I don’t know why all superheroes aren’t PTSD.’ It’s a trip. So she is wrestling with having this damaged past and still trying to contribute something to the world.
Ultimately, Rosenberg’s love for Jessica Jones comes straight from her solo comic series Alias: “I completely saw it on screen. There are things I took directly from the comic book and just put in the script. That was so much fun to do… I love this character. That is an incredibly damaged, dark, complex female character that kicks ass. That’s my favorite thing about it.”
I’m very excited that Rosenberg is still on the project. She sounds like she has a really great handle on the character, and there’s even the hope that we’ll get a reference to Captain Marvel!
(via The Wrap and Superhero Hype.)
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