In April of 2015, Netflix premiered the first season of Marvel's Daredevil, a show that completely changed the game for not only Marvel's on-screen product but also superhero television as a whole. However, Netflix and Marvel Television were far from done innovating. Just seven months later, the two would premiere another series -- one that continued to push the boundaries of what was expected from cape shows and implemented numerous ideas Marvel Studios is only now beginning to include in its big-screen offerings. This is the story of Jessica Jones.

Starring Breaking Bad alum Krysten Ritter as the eponymous, super-powered private investigator, Marvel's Jessica Jones premiered its first season five years ago on Nov. 20, 2015.  It became the last surviving show of Netflix's Marvel lineup, running for a total of 39 episodes across three seasons, and officially concluding in June of 2019. Jessica Jones' legacy has become somewhat muddled among fans in recent years, due in part to criticism that its latter two seasons didn't quite live up to the first, as well as the Netflix-Marvel experiment as a whole ending rather unceremoniously. But make no mistake, Jessica Jones Season 1 is still genuinely masterful television, and the show as a whole deserves nothing but praise for its contributions to the genre.

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Krysten Ritter as Jessica Jones

Season 1 of Jessica Jones was based on the Alias series of comic books by Brian Michael Bendis and Michael Gaydos, which was originally published in the early 2000s under Marvel's adult-oriented MAX Comics imprint. Netflix's Jessica Jones further explored the seedier, more mature side of the Marvel Cinematic Universe that was established in Daredevil, tackling a wide array of new social issues from a unique perspective.

First and foremost, Jessica Jones was one of Marvel's first live-action, solo female-led projects under Disney -- second only to ABC's Agent Carter -- premiering long before films like Captain Marvel and the upcoming Black Widow. It was also the first such project to not only feature LGBTQ+ characters but put them at the forefront, with the character Jeri Hogarth's (Carrie-Anne Moss) divorce from Wendy Ross-Hogarth (Robin Weigert) and affair with Pam (Susie Abromeit) being a rather significant plot thread early on. Once again, this was years before Marvel Studios dipped its toes into LGBTQ+ representation with Avengers: Endgame and laid out plans to build upon it further in upcoming movies like Eternals and Thor: Love and Thunder. Marvel Studios embracing diversity is great, but it's important to remember that Marvel TV did it first.

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That said, Jessica Jones Season 1 was perhaps most lauded for its brutally honest portrayal of being a survivor of abuse and sexual assault and struggling with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), tackling these issues two years before the #MeToo movement began to pick up steam on social media and inform subsequent films and TV shows. It just goes to show that well before the conversation entered the mainstream, it was still incredibly important and personal to a lot of people.

As far as its portrayal of being a sexual assault survivor goes, Jessica Jones did not shy away from dealing with the harsh realities of being in such a position. However, as dark as the show could be, this struggle is one that ultimately ends in triumph for our hero, something that's just as important as addressing the issue itself. What's more, Ritter's here is not solely defined by her trauma or even her superpowers. Beyond that, she's still an interesting and incredibly complex person.

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Purple Man

Still, when it comes to its portrayal of PTSD, Jessica Jones is easily Marvel's best tackling of mental health to date. Iron Man 3 went for a similar angle in 2013 but was largely bound by its PG-13 rating. While Iron Man 3 is a criminally underrated film that gets more flak than it deserves, Jessica Jones represents how effective the film's take on mental health could have been had the powers that be prioritized being true to life over being marketable.

The show also tackled the issue of parental abuse from the perspective of Jessica and her best friend/adoptive sister Trish Walker (Rachael Taylor), as well as drug addiction from the perspective of Malcolm Ducasse (Eka Darville). Of course, it was also Jessica Jones that introduced the world to Mike Colter's Luke Cage. The character played a major role in Season 1, with Colter then jumping into a series of his own.

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Then, you simply cannot talk about Jessica Jones without talking about its main antagonist, Kilgrave. Between the likes of Daredevil's Kingpin and Luke Cage's Cottonmouth, Marvel's Netflix shows garnered a reputation for being far better at creating effective villains than Marvel's films were at the time. Depending on who you ask, however, arguably the best of them all was Jessica Jones' Kilgrave. He was a truly reprehensible individual who carried out unforgivable acts. Even so, he never devolved into pantomime villainy, as the show wasn't afraid to actually make him human as well. This greatly benefited the overall narrative, with Jessica Jones looking into Kilgrave's past, illustrating the cyclical nature of abuse and how cruel tendencies are often learned, while never absolving him of responsibility for his actions. And all of this was underscored by a stunning performance from former Doctor Who's David Tennant.

Jessica Jones was a special show, its first season especially. It completely subverted what people have come to expect from mainstream superheroes, even more than Daredevil in certain respects, addressing real-life problems in an open and honest way. Combine that with an interesting, well-written story, as well as complex characters backed by fantastic performances from the likes of Ritter and Tennant and you have series unlike anything Marvel had done before. Sure, Seasons 2 and 3 didn't quite live up to the expectations Season 1 set, but to be fair, it's pretty hard to top lightning in a bottle.

Like with the rest of Netflix's Marvel heroes, it's unclear when we'll get to see Jessica Jones in live-action again, if at all. But that's why it's so important to celebrate what we do have, and remember that to simply dismiss her series as a thing of the past is to do a great disservice to how important and groundbreaking it truly was -- not just for Marvel, not just for superheroes, but for pop culture at large.

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