'Jessica Jones' explores Marvel's mature side

Brian Truitt | USA TODAY

Iron Man Tony Stark is no Jessica Jones.

Although the Marvel characters do have some common flaws, Krysten Ritter's Jessica Jones (Netflix, Friday) is an iron woman of a different sort.

She’s not very nice, to other people or to her office door. She curses and drinks — a lot. And she is not afraid to get frisky, especially when the brusque private investigator finds a guy who’s as superhumanly strong and sturdy as she is and doesn’t break him in half when they hit the sheets.

“That was something we were looking forward to from the very beginning: When do we get to write that scene?” executive producer Melissa Rosenberg says.

Jones is the second Netflix series (after Daredevil) set in what Ritter proudly boasts as “the seedier side” of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, a world that includes Avengers films as well as ABC's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and Agent Carter. Jones will be followed next year by another season of Daredevil, featuring Charlie Cox’s blind guardian of Hell’s Kitchen, and later, Luke Cage (who appears in Jones), Iron Fist and The Defenders, an Avengers-style all-star show.

With Jones, Rosenberg (Twilight Saga), realizes a dream of sorts: creating a series with a female superhero who had just as many character issues as Iron Man — Downey’s first 2008 movie is a particular favorite.

Jessica makes both friends and enemies skulking around in the night — she has an intimate relationship with Luke (Mike Colter), though there is some history there — and tends to do her own thing while helping the random citizen or her ambitious attorney client (Carrie-Anne Moss).

But a new case brings up bad flashbacks to an old friend/foe known as Kilgrave (David Tennant), whose words can make anyone do his bidding and is the one person who seemingly can control her.

The show “felt totally groundbreaking and unlike anything we’d ever seen, having a female character like this,” Ritter says, adding that a psychological thriller is also new for the Marvel brand.

“Sometimes when you’re watching it, it feels like you’re watching a horror movie, just that level of anxiety and tension and suspension. It’s rad I got to do it.”

At its heart, however, the show is an R-rated character portrait. “The storytelling isn’t about her superpowers or her being a detective,” Rosenberg says. “Those are elements that make up the whole.”

And she’s surrounded by a host of equally complex personalities.

Cage has super-strength and impenetrable skin, yet he also can be a sweet, sensitive guy. Sure, he can tear your head off, Colter says, but “he’s trying to find his way in life, trying to figure himself out. So in a sense he’s a renaissance guy — he’s trying to build himself up as a man.”

Like Vincent D’Onofrio’s Daredevil baddie Wilson Fisk, there’s a slow burn in the reveal of Tennant’s Kilgrave as well as a hint of purple that always surrounds him — a nod to his moniker The Purple Man in the comics.

When playing a psychopath with no moral compass, “you get to dabble in the darker corners of your psyche, in a very safe and legal environment,” Tennant says. As evil as he is, “there’s part of me who feels sorry for Kilgrave. I would suggest that as the series comes toward its conclusion that the audience not see him as entirely unredeemable, either.”