Urban Warrior

“It’s hip-hop television!” Nick Setchfield is in New York to meet Luke Cage, the latest Marvel icon to hit the screen.

Superheroes aren’t renowned for keeping it real.

At their shiniest and most godlike – Superman, Iron Man, Thor – they soar over our cities, characters built for the sky, not the sidewalk. Even urban types like Batman or Spider-Man swoop between the steel towers of Gotham or Manhattan, high above the scuzz and squalor, above the people they’ve pledged to protect. Only the ground-level protagonists of Marvel’s ever-expanding Netflix empire – Daredevil, Jessica Jones, the Punisher – look as if they might have blisters on their heels, let alone zip codes to their names.

“People sometimes get lost in the spandex of it all,” says Cheo Hodari Coker, executive producer and show runner of Netflix’s latest comic book adap. “We focus on the drama and the human interaction in addition to the powers. It’s the opportunity to tell deeper stories.”

NEW YORK MINUTES 

If you want true street credibility, you need to go looking for Luke Cage. SFX has come to New York to find him. We’re in Bedford- Stuyvesant, a neighbourhood once known as Brooklyn’s Little Harlem (tonight it’s doubling for its more famous counterpart across the East River). Here the brownstone buildings hug the horizon, a skyline lower but no less iconic than Manhattan’s skyscrapers. The dazzle of a lighting rig illuminates the huddle of townhouses and fire escapes, a camera crane caught in its sun-bright spotlight. On set, the lights of a parked police car flash in an agitated sequence of red and blue. The sirens of the true-life NYPD howl in the distance.