I'm about two months behind everyone else finishing the Marvel Netflix series
Jessica Jones, a spiritual sibling of the much celebrated
Daredevil, and as far from the TV-logic and twee shenanigans of
Agents of SHIELD as you're likely to get.
I'm going to throw this out there, and I'll ask you to stick with me:
Jessica Jones may be, to live-action superhero media, what
Dark Knight Returns and
Watchmen were to comics in 1986.
Way back in the late-90's/ early-00's, I was reading a lot of this new kid, Brian Michael Bendis, who had some indie success with
Goldfish,
Torso and other gritty crime books (and
Torso is still an amazing read, the based-on-real-events story of famed lawman Elliot Ness trying to find a serial killer in Cleveland after putting Capone behind bars). He followed this by teaming with Oeming on
Powers, a "cops in a world with capes" comic with a decidedly Rated-R bent, and I followed that series for years. Around 2001/2002, Bendis and Gaydos brought
Alias to Marvel and minted their new MAX imprint - a line of comics with a hard "R" rating, but absolutely within the Marvel Universe. Something even DC blanched at, separating Vertigo from DCU proper circa 1994.
This was about fifteen years after the atom-bomb of
Watchmen and
Dark Knight Returns exploded in the comics world and, in the aftermath, the idea that comics could reach an adult audience was left behind in the radiation and sand burnt to glass. Bendis was part of the generation who came into the field when a few things were happening. (A) Reaching an audience older than 17 was now possible - which meant the very real-world problems facing actual humans could be discussed in comics, even with a superheroic bent, which (B) meant that the comics companies were setting up imprints to deal with this idea, keeping their mainline branding safe for the parents associations who would show up and breathe fire and
throw comics retailers in jail from time-to-time for not carefully shelving their wares. And, of course, (C) Marvel was dealing with bankruptcy. I have very little positive to say about 2001-era Marvel honcho Bill Jemas, but he was certainly willing to try new things, and all of that risk-taking has indirectly led to the Marvel we think of today.
Alias showed up in this market as a sort of indie-within-the-Big-2 title. It was something to see a character who smoked and drank and had sex with Luke Cage (which she does in the first few pages of the series - so I feel spoiler free), and met Carol Danvers for coffee. It was a detective series. There was something in her background we'd get to sooner or later, some dark reason she'd quit heroing, but at the outset, it seemed to just be a series about a failed superhero making ends meet and seeing real human foibles and crime in the underbelly of the Marvel U.
So... the TV show.