Obviously, the gorgeous Harlem's Paradise set leaps out at you first. Then there's the music. Both the diegetic songs and the background music are perfect, giving it a delicious seventies exploitation feel. It's peppered with amazing actors. Apart from the ones we all knew from the start would be amazing, I have to mention the guy who played Diamondback, who chews all the scenery like he's out of gum, and I never get tired of watching him do it.
They had a therapist who actually sounded like a real, competent, therapist. I get so tired of movies and shows where the psychologist is just some pompous douche who recites diagnostic terms like that's supposed to fucking help.
The story has depth. It's clear early on that we're stepping in after generations of history. And there are no one-dimensional characters. Even the flunkies have stories. The bad guys have endearing qualities without negating the fact that they're bad guys. The good guys have flaws. Misty is smart, brave, and generally heroic, but she underestimates people on her side, more than once, with tragic consequences. Cornell is a career criminal and a bully who takes no responsibility for the way his ambition runs other people down, but you can't help but feel bad for the kid inside him whose destiny was ground under the feet of someone even worse. And, with Tilda, we get to see how someone who is essentially good, and who was actually doing good, can become something else.
And Tilda might have been showing us where Luke was going. From fugitive to reluctant hero to not-so-reluctant hero, and then…? His future promised to be an interesting exploration of just where hero worship takes us, and what it does to our heroes, when the whole thing was shut down. I don't have much faith that the character's current stewards will prove worthy of what was dropped in their laps.
This show might be the best of all four when it comes to staying in touch with the comics, too. They even managed to get Diamondback's comic book costume onto the screen, and there was a shot of Cottonmouth firing a rocket launcher that was Watchmen-level storyboard-echoing.
Finally, while I'm not gonna diss the Defenders miniseries, Luke Cage gave us the best Power Man and Iron Fist adventure to ever show up on screen. The S2 E10 story, "The Main Ingredient" was what I wanted to see from the moment I heard that Netflix was going to bring these two characters together. This is probably the easiest achievement to follow, so maybe we'll at least get a bit more of that kind of fun.
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