Posted in: Movies, Netflix, TV | Tagged: daredevil, entertainment, inhumans, jeph loeb, television, the defenders

Jeph Loeb Wanted Daredevil To Be Better Than Lilyhammer

Marvel Television has been growing rapidly, going from two dramas three years ago to now being on six platforms across broadcast, cable, and streaming. The man behind most of that is their Head of Television, Jeph Loeb, who spoke with Variety about the growth of the studio and the 14 series in some form of production at the moment.

Loeb doesn't look at it like a studio:

"We see ourselves as producers who are working to support the vision of our showrunner. But we're involved in every aspect of the production — whether it's being in the writers' room, editing on set, casting — every step of the production goes through the Marvel team to tell the best story that we can."

How Daredevil was key to expanding past Disney-ABC:

"It was a critical show for a lot of reasons — not just that we were on a different platform. Oddly enough, Netflix was a very young network at the time. It's hard to imagine because their growth has been spectacularly high. I remember going in when we first talked to them, and they basically had 'House of Cards,' 'Orange Is the New Black' and 'Lilyhammer.' And all we said was, 'We think we can do better than Lilyhammer.' And by the way, big shout-out to all you Lilyhammer fans."

On whether they did better than Lilyhammer:

"I hope so. We don't tend to think in terms of how well we're doing. We tend to think of how our audience is responding to the stories that we're telling, and at least so far they seem to like what we're doing."

And on having both The Defenders and Inhumans to show off at Comic-Con:

"You never get to say, 'We're going to do something that's never been done in the history of television" — and we get to do it twice in San Diego. Netflix believed in what we wanted to do, which was to do five series, four of which ['Daredevil', 'Jessica Jones', 'Luke Cage', 'Iron Fist'] would culminate in the fifth. And we've been fortunate enough to see other things happen, like Daredevil, season two, and 'The Punisher,' which was not part of any plan. The other monumental task that we took on was to try to find a way to expand broadcast television into a world that hasn't been done before. The first two episodes of 'The Inhumans' will premiere on Imax screens throughout the world before they come to ABC. To be able to experience television in a brand-new way and hopefully drive people both to the theater and to the network — that speaks to the power of the Marvel brand and the uniqueness of what it is that we're trying to do."

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