Modern Marvel

Not that he’s rebooted Do the Right Thing, exactly. Luke Cage is fundamentally a four-quadrant-seeking, crowd-pleasing, big-tent affair, like Empire, Power, or the Thursday-night Shonda Rhimes–fest on ABC. The success of those shows suggests that we may have finally entered a new epoch in the 21st century’s golden age of television. For years, the nascent medium of prestige TV drama was defined by what author Brett Martin has called difficult men—grimly captivating white guys like Tony Soprano, Don Draper, and Walter White, struggling to find a foothold in a culture and economy that were leaving them behind. That was before Netflix and Amazon and their respective breakout hits, Orange Is the New Black and Transparent, proved that hit dramas could move beyond straight white men.

“Luke Cage is not an angelic figure,” says John Singleton. “It’s the right time for this kind of hero. He’s so needed in the world.”

In part, this is a happy consequence of the TV wars. As a glut of competitors have pumped out a steady stream of compelling shows, executives are more motivated than ever to find programs that will stand out from the crowd. Subscription-based digital platforms, eager to reach into global markets and unburdened by skittish advertisers, are more willing to gamble on series that traditional networks might consider too risky. In the meantime, three decades of boundary-pushing television has created a more sophisticated audience, willing to watch characters that previous generations may have found alienating. “It evolves, but incredibly slowly,” says Jessica Jones’ Rosenberg. “I think we are beyond overdue for both Luke Cage and Jessica Jones.”

Compared to his big-screen Marvel counterparts, like Iron Man and Thor, Netflix’s Luke Cage might seem like a low-stakes superhero. He isn’t out to save the universe, and he doesn’t wear a flashy costume; he rarely even uses his superpowers, which are presented more as a behavioral quirk than a defining characteristic of his personality. He’s deeply flawed, haunted by his past, and, as Colter says, might pick up women at a funeral. But that’s precisely what makes him so heroic. He’s working on it, struggling to accept himself in the face of a world that keeps pushing him toward invisibility. “So many times, black protagonists have to be holier than thou, but he’s not an angelic figure,” says John Singleton, the Boyz n the Hood director and a friend of Coker’s. “It’s the right time for this kind of hero. He’s so needed in the world.”

It was around 2014, when Coker was doing a round of touch-ups on the screenplay for Straight Outta Compton, that Marvel started looking for a showrunner for Luke Cage. From the beginning, says Jeph Loeb, head of Marvel’s television division, the company was looking for someone who could not only entertain but also address issues of race: “What is going on in this country for blacks and whites, and how can we tell that story through the eyes of a superhero?” Marvel was in the midst of expanding its roster of nonwhite superheroes, including introducing a Muslim Ms. Marvel and a Latino Spider-Man. The company has since hired Ta-Nehisi Coates, author of the best-­selling Between the World and Me, to pen the newest adventures of Black Panther, the supergenius ruler of a fictional African nation. (That character will soon appear in a film directed by Ryan Coogler, who helmed Fruitvale Station, about a victim of police violence, and Creed, the heroic saga of Apollo Creed’s son.) Still, this was Marvel’s first attempt to create a series or film with a black protagonist at its center, a responsibility that Loeb took very seriously. “If we can get one person to watch the show and to think differently about what it is to be a hero in the present day, and what it is to be a black hero, then that’s a victory,” he says.

Coker developed a story about a prison escapee living anonymously in Harlem—until he’s unable to resist the responsibility to help his community.

At his first meeting with Marvel, Coker brought a photograph of his grandfather, a Tuskegee Airman who had been awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross. “I talked about him being from Harlem,” Coker says. “Walking up the boulevards, you’d see Duke Ellington and Chick Webb and Lionel Hampton, just walking around. You saw superheroes every day.” Initially, Coker saw Luke Cage exploring a similar dynamic, the pressures of a known superhero operating in the real world, but Marvel wanted Cage to grow into his role as a superhero, not to start out as one. Coker went back to work and developed a new story about an unfairly arrested prison escapee living anonymously in Harlem—until he finds himself unable to resist the responsibility to help his community that his superpowers impose on him. He packed his story with colorful characters and midseason plot twists. And he suggested a soundscape that leaned heavily on early ’90s hip hop.

The resulting series is many things. A comic-book adventure. A neo-­blaxploitation epic. An urban drama. An addition to the Marvel metaverse. But it also looks suspiciously like the product of a personal fever dream, a synthesis of Coker’s many obsessions, woven into one narrative. It’s not hard to picture a teenage Coker poring over comic books while listening to hip hop and talking to his grandfather about Harlem, imagining the series he would finally create decades later. At least that’s how Coker sees it. “I finally have these heroes,” he says, “these images that have been in my head for the past 20 years.”