“Marvel’s Jessica Jones,” the second Marvel Studios property to be led by a female character, is best described by explaining what it is not. It’s a comic-book show, but it’s not your average comic-book show. It stars a superhero, but she’s not your average superhero. And it’s about good guys beating up bad guys, but not in the classic caped-crusader airborne battle. “Jessica Jones” is instead a story of one superhero in a hostile world—a single character’s slice in what is otherwise a sprawling, Technicolor supernatural universe. Even in the original comics the show is based on, Jessica Jones is defined by her difference from the rest of Marvel’s superheroes. She left the Avengers to be a private eye, starting her own detective agency, Alias Investigations. It helps that she can break padlocks with one hand, but her greatest asset isn’t super-strength, it’s her tenacity. And she doesn’t have a superhero alterego; if anything, she prefers the shadows to the limelight.
This is why, if you’re a newcomer to comic books, or even just not that interested in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, “Jessica Jones,” now available on Netflix, could still be for you. Aside from the fact that a few people in the story have extraordinary abilities, there are no costumes, no aliens and no easy answers. Jessica (Krysten Ritter, in the show) doesn’t run around and save the day for other people; she works cases while trying to untangle the mess that is her own life. Much like Veronica Mars, that other cult-favorite noir-ish private eye, Jessica is carrying around a central, unspoken mystery, a horrible trauma that she is barely able to live with. The story of the first season of “Jessica Jones” is that the perpetrator of the trauma—a mind-controlling psychopath named Kilgrave (David Tennant)—is looking for Jessica, and has just finally found her again.