LUKE CAGE
SEASON 1

A MUSIC JOURNALIST BECOMES SHOWRUNNER

CHEO HODARI COKER TAKES CHARGE OF THE THIRD NETFLIX SERIES

Luke Cage was the third Marvel and Netflix collaboration to reach screens, after Daredevil and Jessica Jones, where Mike Colter had already introduced the character.

Marvel Television announced Cheo Hodari Coker as executive producer and showrunner on 31 March 2015, with a premiere planned for 2016. His television credits included Ray Donovan (season 2) and Southland (season 4), and he wrote the screenplay for the rap biopic Notorious. He would write the opening episodes, and he had a journalism background at publications including the Los Angeles Times and Rolling Stone.

Speaking at the Captain America: Civil War premiere in April 2016, Coker said he wanted Luke Cage to be “The Wire of Marvel television, because we really deal with a lot of different issues.”

A HARLEM CAST

COLTER, ALI, WOODARD AND MISSICK FILL OUT THE NEIGHBOURHOOD

Mike Colter had been announced to play Luke Cage, with the character first appearing in Jessica Jones before headlining his own show. Alfre Woodard joined the cast in August 2015, after her work on True Blood and The Last Ship.

Mahershala Ali plays Cornell “Cottonmouth” Stokes, who owns the Harlem’s Paradise nightclub, and Woodard plays Mariah Dillard, a New York City Council member and Stokes’s cousin. Simone Missick plays the NYPD detective Misty Knight, Theo Rossi plays Hernan “Shades” Alvarez, and Erik LaRay Harvey plays Willis Stryker, who goes by Diamondback. Rosario Dawson returns as the nurse Claire Temple.

The cast made its first major appearance at San Diego Comic-Con in July 2016. Woodard told the panel that Harlem “deserves a number as well” and is a character, and Colter said it is “a drama first and foremost, and it’s set in a superhero world.”

A SCORE AND A STAGE

ADRIAN YOUNGE, ALI SHAHEED MUHAMMAD AND THE LIVE ACTS AT HARLEM’S PARADISE

Music was part of the pitch. Coker said at the Civil War premiere that the show was very sophisticated, with a ’90s hip-hop vibe that was still forward-thinking, and that Adrian Younge and Ali Shaheed Muhammad were scoring it.

The club setting let the series book real performers. At a Television Critics Association panel, it was announced that Charles Bradley, Faith Evans, Raphael Saadiq and Jidenna would perform at the Paradise, the nightclub owned by Cottonmouth, and that each episode title referred to a Gang Starr song. The acts appear by episode: Saadiq in episode 1, Evans in episode 2, Bradley in episode 3, Jidenna in episode 5, The Delfonics in episode 9, Method Man in episode 12 and Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings in episode 13.

RACE, HARLEM AND A BULLETPROOF HERO

THE HOODIE, THE NEIGHBOURHOOD AND WHAT THE CREATORS SAID ABOUT THEM

Rotten Tomatoes’ consensus credits the season’s “immersive, socially conscious narrative” and a confident, charismatic lead performance.

The hoodie became the series’ most discussed image. In an interview published on 28 September 2016, Coker discussed how the hoodie responds to the stigma that followed Trayvon Martin’s death.

“My thing about that was showing that heroes can wear hoodies too.”

Cheo Hodari Coker, 28 September 2016

On 30 September 2016, Colter said, “There’s no accident that I’m wearing a hoody because of Trayvon Martin.” The season is also a violent crime drama with gun violence, so some viewers may want to check the content first.

THE REWATCH

A BINGE RELEASE, COTTONMOUTH’S EXIT, ESTIMATED VIEWERS AND A CANCELLATION

Netflix released all 13 episodes on 30 September 2016, with runtimes from 46 minutes (“You Know My Steez”) to 66 minutes (“DWYCK”). The next day, Saturday 1 October, Netflix suffered an outage that lasted nearly three hours for US viewers, many of them reportedly eager to binge the new series, and the company did not immediately provide details of the cause.

This paragraph mentions a mid-season plot development. Ali’s Cottonmouth leaves the story partway through the season. In August 2024, Coker said the plan had always been to kill the character in the middle of the season, and that it was the reason Ali agreed to take the role. Ali went on to win the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for Moonlight.

In November 2016, Symphony Advanced Media estimated that 6.34% of video viewers were tuned in to Luke Cage in an average minute over its first 32 days, against 5.94% for Daredevil Season 2. Netflix does not publicly release streaming data, so such third-party measurements cannot be verified, and the figure measures something different from the viewer counts quoted on the other Netflix pages here.

Netflix announced a second season in early December 2016. In October 2018, Netflix cancelled the series after two seasons.

Rotten Tomatoes lists a 90% critics’ score from 72 reviews, and its consensus calls the series “a stellar sampling of the new Marvel/Netflix universe.” Metacritic gives the season a 79 from 30 critics. The series won a single Emmy, the 2017 award for Outstanding Stunt Coordination for a drama series, limited series or movie, credited to James Lew.

In the Marvel Marathon it sits in the Marvel TV shows in order guide between Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. Season 4 and Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.: Slingshot, and in the MCU timeline guide between Daredevil Season 2 and Iron Fist Season 1.