I loved Luke Cage.
So this is not a review. Here let me review Luke Cage: All the stars. Whatever. It's a great show. Mostly I point out that this is not a review cause I'm gonna talk about spoilers. Really i'm gonna try and take the thing apart, and it's been long enough that I'm not concerned about spoilers anymore. I'm not taking the deep dive because the show is so great, but because there's nothing like it anywhere else.
For real, there's nothing like Luke Cage on TV.
It's optimistic. How is that possible? It takes place in a modern day New York that is teaming with tensions of all sorts, with everyone on both sides of every issue experiencing this kind of withering fatigue at the lack of change in any direction.
It's got a positive male main lead. Luke Cage is a powerful man who uses his power with care and compassion. The MCU, the Netflix shows especially, are filled with dark and brooding main characters that are constantly confronting difficult moral choices and having to make the hard call about who live and who dies. What sacrifices are necessary to make the world a better place. Luke Cage is just out there screaming for everyone to take a breath while he pretzels another gun.
It's got women all over everywhere. It's full of of amazing fully 3D female characters with lots of screen time and all of the best lines in the series. Female villains. Female friends. Females on staff and in the writing room. Females in the crew. Females you love and females you love to hate.
It's not made with me in mind, but it is. I'll admit I had an uncomfortable moment where it took me a minute to realize that there was a reason that I was missing some of the references and kept having to google things. But it's still the kind of show that deals with a man who catches bullets and pretzels the occasional gun, no really it's a lot of guns. It's a comic book show for sure, but its in a world that I recognize but mostly through what I don't recognize. It's a stark reminder that most things are made with me in mind, and I have to say that the uncomfortable reminder was a good feeling. A reminder that there's still a lot to learn in the world.
So I'm interrupting the regular flow of book reviews to really dig into this show and see what's so great about it. I'm not even going to really deal with the stuff I posted about today. That's just the surface bits that make the show worth watching. It's what the show has to say that really has me chomping at the keyboard to write about. See you next Saturday for more Luke Thoughts!
I nearly forgot! Other people have also been loving Luke Cage and I've been reading them while I was putting my thoughts together. Here are some relevant links:
Thaddeus Howze puts up his opinion on Polygon.com
Noah Berlatsky on how you can have a show about racism when there's so few white folk on the show.