Luke Cage first popped up in Netflix’s super-powered noir Jessica Jones: a softly spoken bartender played by The Good Wife’s absurdly handsome Mike Colter. Cage was a sexy player with a tragic past, who also happened to have super strength and unbreakable skin – useful skills when it came to helping Jones clean up Hell’s Kitchen. But in his upcoming solo series, Cage has relocated across 110th Street. The latest trailer shows him in Harlem reading Walter Mosley novels, working in a barbershop and pondering what to do with his powers – the result of nefarious experiments in which Cage, it is strongly implied, was not a willing participant.
“I just want to be left the hell alone,” he says. But then a sharp-suited, piano-playing gangster with an ostentatious portrait of the Notorious BIG on his wall threatens Cage’s hard-working friends and neighbours; at which point, Cage rips off a car door with his bare hands and starts cracking skulls, demonstrating that Daredevil – the Netflix original that launched their current purple patch of Marvel-related series – doesn’t have a monopoly on crunching fight scenes in cramped, queasily lit corridors.
Cage has not always been so civic-minded. The character first appeared in comics in 1972, an unashamed attempt by Marvel to cash in on the success of blaxploitation movies. After gaining powers while being used as a human guinea pig in prison, Cage adopted a flouncy yellow shirt and steel tiara to become Power Man, a cash-conscious enforcer who would save the day and then demand his fee. There were no exceptions. When armoured supervillain Doctor Doom hired Power Man as muscle and then refused to pay, Cage burst into his castle lair and demanded: “Where’s my money, honey?” In the four decades since, comicbook Cage has ditched the jive and settled down, becoming a father and – in a nod to his own troubled past – working to help reform prisoners.
Luke Cage showrunner Cheo Hodari Coker has worked on dramas such as Ray Donovan and Southland, but he cut his teeth as a music journalist at the height of the Biggie/Tupac rivalry and seems determined to bring his hip-hop hinterland to bear on the show. Previous trailers have been soundtracked with the Wu-Tang’s Ol’ Dirty Bastard, and at San Diego Comic-Con last month, Coker revealed that all 13 Luke Cage episodes would be named after tracks by east-coast hip-hop duo Gang Starr.
The show was conceived as part of Netflix’s ambitious plan to launch separate series featuring four street-level Marvel heroes, before bringing them all together for their own Avengers-style team-up called The Defenders. When it was first announced, the strategy seemed optimistic, but the overwhelmingly positive reaction to both Daredevil and Jessica Jones – renewed for a third and second season respectively – has turned Netflix’s Marvel project into a production line. Giving Luke Cage some hip-hop credibility could help the series seem like more than just another component in an overarching corporate strategy.
He may have faced down Doctor Doom, but Cage will soon have to deal with a very different foe. In an intriguing bit of counter-programming, Netflix’s Luke Cage is going head-to-head with another legendary New York native, starring in a series that also features a barbershop: Woody Allen’s first ever TV project, Crisis in Six Scenes, is set to released by Amazon on the same day.
• Season one of Luke Cage will be released on Netflix on 30 September
