People Who Just Love Punching: Every Season Of Marvel’s Netflix Superhero Shows Ranked
From 'Iron Fist' all the way up to 'Daredevil'.
We’ve been neck deep in superhero content for years now, just overflowing with muscly boys and girls, absolutely enthralled with the various dramas of punching and kicking. Who to kick, and why? These are some of the questions we’ve explored throughout the years, especially on the Marvel Netflix exclusive superhero shows.
Marvel’s Netflix shows were designed to tie-in to the ludicrously popular Marvel Cinematic Universe, being set canonically in the same world, but with none of the big name Hollywood actors. You weren’t going to see Thor pop in and say hi and smash some things.
Instead, they focused on smaller, more local battles, with heroes who weren’t as flashily powerful as some of The Avengers, which meant that we got a lot of heroes beating up on crooks with guns, or ninja crooks with swords. Cest la vie!
However, they’re all done now! They ended with Jessica Jones season 3, sacrificed to make way for the next generation of small-screen Marvel heroes on the new Disney + channel.
But — they’re all still on Netflix, so let’s work out which ones as worth watching.
13. Iron Fist Season 1
Hoo-boy! In a way it was quite impressive how unenjoyable they managed to make the first season of Iron Fist. Like — at the very least with a superhero show, you can usually just stop your brain from forming complex thoughts and watch the bright lights and colourful action scenes, like pretty much every episode of Arrow.
But for some reason, Iron Fist decided that not only did they want to create a hero defined by the emotion of petulance, they would also really lean in to the drama of big corporate shake-ups. Nobody likes “big news at the office” as the defining arc of a superhero show, even if the big-bad ends up being a violent undead CEO. Give us more fights! Give us a story!
Iron Fist Season 1 was a tedious experiment in learning just how much you don’t care about a privileged dumb-dumb named Danny Rand. Also, it was pretty thoroughly roasted for cultural appropriation issues too.
12. The Defenders
Netflix unfortunately doubled down on their giant swing and a miss with Iron Fist, by making their big crossover extravaganza series The Defenders very primarily about Danny Rand.
This was a big mistake in itself, but the whole series was very tortured. The whole concept of the show was getting the four main Netflix heroes into one big story, with a whole bunch of elements and villains and storylines all coming together in one place. Unfortunately, that place was stupid. It could have been great. It could have been The Avengers. It was not.
They managed to take extremely developed characters like Jessica Jones and Luke Cage and dumb them down into one-note parodies of themselves, who every so often managed to throw out a catch-phrase or a sardonic quip. They artificially got them all together, then deliberately created some lame, made-up tension to split them apart and then uneasily unite them.
There were a lot of ninjas at least.
11. Luke Cage Season 2
This is not a terrible season, but it does suffer from a lack of motivation. You just don’t really understand what Luke Cage’s reason for doing all this is, despite the fact that every episode features a tortured monologue about precisely that topic.
The overall arc of the season is the bad voodoo guy Bushmaster, who wants revenge on Maria Dillard, has come to Harlem and is causing trouble. It’s not a bad plotline, but it takes FOREVER to actually get anywhere, and there’s a feeling that three lacklustre stories have been smooshed together, and Luke Cage is also hanging out at the periphery.
Honestly, the show would be 100% more action-packed and full of believable stakes if it was simply Misty Knight trying to stop Maria Dillard, while Cage blunders around somewhere off-screen making a big mess.
10. Iron Fist Season 2
As we wrote in more detail, Iron Fist Season 2 deserves a lot of points because it tried its darnedest, and it mostly succeeded!
Mostly, it’s a great season because there are entire episodes where Danny is in bed and Misty Knight and Colleen Wing run around solving crimes, and it’s great fun! But unfortunately, Danny does come back.
9. The Punisher Season 2
If you love violence and a kind of Logan-lite plotline, then there’s a lot in this season for you.
However, it suffers a ridiculous dip in energy and the writing just seems inconsistent. But, he seems a lot better mentally, so that’s nice.
8. Daredevil Season 2
After a strong first season, Daredevil Season 2 suffered a bit of a lack of purpose. It was scattered, out of focus. It also kinda leaped around in terms of pacing, spending long periods of time going down dead-end plot points. There were essentially two whole arcs in this, and it was confusing watching them interact with each other.
But, all that aside, the series introduces both The Punisher and Elektra, who are both compelling characters, and there is all sorts of ninja-fighting biffo.
7. The Punisher Season 1
The Punisher is a weird beast, probably only comparable to the other superhero shows in the sense that it’s about yet another melancholy man. However, this one uses guns!
There’s a weird dance that the show has to do in order to push back and forth from psychotic anti-hero to someone more relatable, which they do through the old ‘dead family’ sob story, but once you get past how boring that is, it’s actually a pretty tense and action-driven series.
6. Jessica Jones Season 2
An extremely slow start to this season probably turned a lot of people off, but once it gets going, it’s a worthy successor to the extremely strong first season.
It was always going to be a big task to separate Jessica Jones from her antagonist, Kilgrave — but digging deeper into her trauma and past creates a very worthwhile challenge, while growing her character in some interesting and tragic ways. It’s good! Persevere.
5. Jessica Jones Season 3
This is a messy season, but it’s got a lot to love.
The age-old question of the ethics of super-power is explored at least in an interesting way, with Jessica being forced to duel against her sister Trish, and an unpowered serial killer who is protected by the law. It’s frustrating at times, but quite good. It’s not the way I’d choose to send off both this character and the entire run of Marvel Netflix shows, but hey.
4. Luke Cage Season 1
Luke Cage had a lot going for it — it’s a more sumptuous and aesthetically loaded series than the rest of its superhero friends. You could watch it just for the music alone, not to mention the gorgeously dark glamour of the primary villains, Cottonmouth and Maria Dillard.
Also, Luke Cage is a pretty damn fun character. After the tortured pathos of Matt Murdock and the traumatised toughness of Jessica Jones, he’s honestly a relative ball of sunshine. He smiles every so often! Unfortunately, the biggest weakness of the season is the fact that Luke doesn’t really know what the fuck he’s doing, so it meanders a little, but it’s still fun.
3. Daredevil Season 3
After a slower second season, Daredevil comes back in a big way!
The trick is by pairing him up against his classic antagonist, Kingpin. Wilson Fisk is almost compulsory viewing, and is the perfect mirror for Matt Murdoch’s somewhat melodramatic attitude to everything. It’s like, calm down buddy.
2. Daredevil Season 1
The very first of Marvel’s Netflix offerings still holds up. Characterised by its spellbinding action scenes and fairly brutal beatings, it showed us exactly what a more prestige-style of superhero show would look like. It was less trashy than DC’s previous offerings, and less shiny than Marvel’s other, non-Netflix show, Agents of Shield. It was very exciting.
The only real criticism now is that its formula was a little basic — very much a superhero origin story — and we’ve seen that repeated 1000 times since.
1. Jessica Jones Season 1
There is no better developed superhero character on the screen, large or small, than Jessica Jones.
The first season of Jessica Jones manages to touch on themes of trauma and PTSD while still also being about a woman who can punch extremely hard, which is fun to watch. She’s the foul-mouthed, hard-drinking, eye-rolling, private eye superhero of our hopes and dreams. Her character alone would almost be enough to let her top the list, let alone the fact that she’s played by Kristen Ritter, who is amazing.
But, place her in opposition against literally the most terrifying super-villain on TV, the mind-controlling Kilgrave, played creepily by the long and British David Tennant, and we get the best of Netflix’s current offerings of superhero shows.
It’s gonna be super interesting what Disney’s new streaming service will do with its official TV spin-offs from the Marvel Cinematic Universe. If they’re done well, they can take all the best lessons from Netflix’s current shows, but pump much more money and big Hollywood names into their new series. Exciting!
Patrick Lenton is the Entertainment Editor at Junkee. He tweets @patricklenton.