The Defenders Was A Disappointment
Look, let’s just admit it: The Defenders wasn’t great. Some neat action sequences and hints at future character crossovers aside, The Defenders was a dud, with the viewership stats to prove it. A group of heroes fight evil ninjas, HBO-style is great on paper, but in execution, over eight hours, with a team that only barely gelled, it just didn’t work. Only half the protagonists, Danny Rand and Matt Murdoch, had genuine reason to be present, Murdoch being the only one whose story was effectively moved forward any. The casting of Sigourney Weaver is the sole reason the main antagonist was in any way interesting and Elektra and Daredevil’s tragic love-story had some legs to it until you realize it’s a shameless rehash of Steve and Bucky’s plot from the Captain America films. And that’s before we talk about the labored sleuthing and exposition to pad out the story and kill time between fight scenes.
And to be fair to the show, a lot of the issues are inherent in the concept. Doing a big crossover is easy when the crossing-over is occurring within a two-hour period with lots of punching and explosions, ditto when drawing from films of a similar length. The longer the crossover and the more distinct the individual composite parts, the harder it gets to create a plot that satisfies all parties and works on its own merits. Jessica Jones and Luke Cage were mostly relegated to co-star status because the corners they inhabit in the Netflix-verse had very little to do with The Hand before The Defenders, and the overlap is still minute. The chemistry and interplay did provide some solace Cage did wonders getting Rand over after the tepid response to Iron Fist but even that could only do so much. In fact, the biggest takeaway from The Defenders was how unnecessary it is as a show of its own.
Netflix Doesn’t Need Avengers-Style Team-Ups
Each of the team members’ own series, as well as The Punisher, has its own thematic and narrative through-lines. Daredevil’s struggle to keep his community honest and fair is different to Jessica Jones’ personal battle with internalized trauma which is another animal to Frank Castle’s brand of vigilante-therapy for the system that made him a killer and took away his family and so on. One of the great qualities of what Netflix and Marvel are doing here is that we get to see deeper versions of these heroes than any film would allow. These series can get intimate and focus in on uncomfortable ideas and relationships within these characters in ways that make railroading their stories into some forced inter-mingling unnecessary, even undesirable. When these shows are good they stand on their own in such a way that it’s not seeing them together that’s the exciting part, it’s the next season.
That’s not to say the minor nods to one another aren’t to be appreciated. Rosario Dawson’s Night Nurse has been a recurring source of warmth and humanization in the universe, and Karen Page was an invaluable asset to The Punisher. These cursory reminders of a shared existence adequately remind us of the different stories all happening concurrently, while providing fan-service to comics history that’s not over-bearing. There’s a refreshing independence to each plot that is ultimately harmed when one of the release slots for a new season is taken by a contrived get-together to fight some one-off villain.
That doesn’t mean there isn’t room for some bigger ideas, though.
The Future Of Marvel/Netflix
The CW’s Arrowverse has managed to establish a strong TV-specific system for doing crossovers over the years. As there are stretches where all the shows are airing at the same time, crossovers occur a couple of times a season between two or more series, breaking the adventure down into a two-to-four-part mini-series. The biggest of these was last year’s ‘Crisis On Earth-X’ that saw the casts of Arrow, Legends of Tomorrow, Supergirl and The Flash all come together to take down a Nazi-led version of Earth. Over the course of that week’s episode of each show, fans got multiple plot-lines featuring many of the various casts interacting with each other, as well as several doubling up as their Earth-X Nazi counterpart. It was fun and dramatic and simultaneously furthered some familiar narratives while providing a short reprieve from following four separate shows on a weekly basis.
The guiding principle in the Arrowverse is that its crossovers don’t just happen for the sake of them. In Earth-X, for example, everyone was in Central City to attend Barry Allen’s wedding. The setting was an event set to happen anyway, they simply maximized its potential for drama. Previous to that, Flash and Supergirl were brought together by the Music Meister. Again, the crossing of streams was derived from an idea already in play. With The Defenders, the opposite was true the crossover was calendared before the compelling foundation was laid down.
This arrangement would be ideal for Marvel and Netflix. Creating events without disrupting or distracting from the main narratives. But the biggest hurdle for Marvel’s Netflix-verse replicating this mini-series/TV-movie structure is the release structure. Designating a particular week in a network schedule for a massive segway just isn’t an option and having part one of, say, The Punisher and Jessica Jones meeting in the next season of The Punisher to be followed by part two in season three of Jessica is less than ideal when at the very least there’ll be months in between the two seasons. Deciding to do another special crossover as even just a two-hour long event means placing emphasis on it and releasing it as its own thing, coming back to the problem of trying to work around established plots that are in-between seasons.
However, they have proven that they’re capable of building characters into other shows in a way that service grander narratives. The Punisher in Daredevil season two stole the show and Luke Cage being introduced in Jessica Jones were clever ways to acknowledge comics history while bringing two similarly-themed people together. The hurdle is doing so without letting the visiting character hijack the series or the show becoming about something removed from its original thesis. Punisher was always a foil for Daredevil, as was Cage to Jessica. They’re not meant to become the center of attention.
These are the crossovers the universe should foster; ones that focus on the interplay between a set of rogue vigilantes all existing in the same space who will need each other from time-to-time, but hell if any will admit it. These are what create a world that’s lived in and complex, whose dangers and threats are multiple and whose history is diverse and affecting its inhabitants in a myriad of ways. More importantly, they mean writers don’t have to struggle to justify someone hanging around if it’s out of character or make sure everyone gets an equal or near-enough amount of screen-time.
The future of the Marvel/Netflix deal is uncertain due to the burgeoning Disney streaming service, which will likely take future productions of the shows in-house. Bad news for Netflix as it may be, it’s good news for these shows as it means they aren’t as beholden to a set contractual structure. There can be more variables in length and release if everything is coming from Disney themselves. This opens all kinds of avenues for the established characters as well as new ones and how they’ll meet and overlap. A second go for The Defenders might become the most exciting option a couple of years from now as Disney roll out some innovative online distribution ideas of their own. For now, the team had their moment, and for the good of themselves and everyone else, it’s best they just leave it at that.
