Marvel’s Amazing Adventures

He didn’t know it, but the day Jeph Loeb picked up his first comic book, he was preparing to change the future of television.

“Comics were certainly some of the first things I ever read, and at first, I was a DC Comics and a Marvel Comics guy,” the writer-producer says. “That’s how it begins. You read Superman and Batman and start to realize Marvel characters are maybe a bit more grounded. You’re not really sure about your choices when you’re seven or eight, but at 10, I knew that Marvel was cool, and I’d rather be hanging out with the cool kids.”

A few decades later, it’s the cool kids who want to hang out with him, because he’s parlayed his love of comics into a job as the head of Marvel Television.

Under Loeb’s supervision, Marvel Entertainment’s TV arm is flexing its muscle like, well, like a superhero. It has Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. on ABC, Legion on FX and six shows on Netflix: Daredevil, Jessica Jones, Luke Cage, Iron Fist, The Defenders and The Punisher. Coming soon are Fox’s The Gifted, ABC’s Inhumans, Hulu’s Runaways and Freeform’s Cloak and Dagger as well as New Warriors.

It’s not like Marvel lacked a presence on the small screen before it launched the TV production unit in 2010. The Incredible Hulk and Spiderman had their own series in the ’70s. Meanwhile, animated versions of superheroes from Iron Man to the Avengers to the Fantastic Four have been around for years.

However, when Marvel Entertainment president Dan Buckley asked him to run the TV division, Loeb knew “there was no division to run.” The company was, as he recalls, “sort of in the animation business, so the first thing we did was to get that really up and running.”

The next step was to create live-action series, a task that proved more difficult than expected. Marvel heroes couldn’t compete on TV with their big-screen counterparts because, as Loeb says, the movies are known for “hitting home runs that not only go out of the park — people are still looking for the balls.” Which meant the company’s first live-action show, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., seemed set up for failure when it launched on ABC in 2013.

“Coming out of the gate, there were a lot of expectations to live up to,” recalls Clark Gregg, who plays agent Phil Coulson on the series and in the feature films. “Our experience was, ‘Oh, great! Where’s Iron Man? Where’s Thor?’ People were used to a project that takes two years and an astronomically large budget to make. The lucky part is that people are discovering we’re about agents, not superheroes.”

Adds Loeb: “There was this perception that we were going to somehow make Marvel movies for television, but a movie takes 18 months and hundreds of millions of dollars to make. It was obvious to us you can’t do that with TV shows. We knew it would take time for people to understand we were doing something different.”

Perhaps because he’d never had a job running a studio, Loeb’s strategy for Marvel was to rely on the factors he’d always loved in the movies and comic books. As in, the characters must always be “real people with real problems,” he says. “Every show has to be about something other than Bad Guy Wants X and Good Guy Stops Bad Guy.”

When it comes to genre entertainment, Loeb certainly knows his stuff. He’s spent most of his life not only writing comic books for Marvel but also scripting films like Teen Wolf and Commando and series like Heroes and Lost. All that geek cred is what prompted Marvel’s Buckley to bring Loeb aboard once the company decided to dive into television.

When Buckley describes his TV chief as “a nerd’s nerd,” he means it as a compliment. Loeb’s uncanny ability to answer “any esoteric question about comics in the ’60s, ’70s or ’80s” is proof to Buckley that he understands Marvel’s audience as well as anyone.

“Jeph knows how to make this stuff come to life,” Buckley says. “He can talk to anyone anytime about our characters, and even though he knows how to package them in a comic book, he also knows that’s very different from making a television show about them. That’s why we can walk into any project with no preconceived notion of what it should be like, because Jeph and his team understand the characters in the comics, but also want to make them their own.”

Loeb brought in veteran TV producer Jim Chory (Heroes, Smash) as executive vice-president and co-head of television to help navigate the logistics of production. Chory acts as a troubleshooter, floating from set to set as Loeb’s eyes and ears.

Soon after taking the gig, he discovered a little secret: “Jeph pretends he doesn’t understand the day-to-day operation of a TV studio, but he really does.” What sets Loeb apart from his peers, Chory says, is that he is “genuinely interested in what people do, and that curiosity is what makes him such a brilliant storyteller.”

Still, Loeb is well aware that he’s not crafting the Marvel brand for television on his own. Like, say, the Avengers or X-Men, he considers every show a team effort. Marvel TV’s real-life work ethic requires the same level of dedication that drives its fictional heroes.

The shows, Loeb says, “benefit enormously because there’s not one single person driving it all. The team here starts at 8 a.m., and even when we go home at 8 p.m., we’re still talking on the phone, because the way we make TV excites us.”

That’s definitely true of Buckley, even though he’s usually in New York, while Loeb and Chory work in Los Angeles. Buckley also oversees the comic book division and works with all the other groups producing Marvel content, but he makes sure to add his thoughts to the company’s many TV productions to keep them on brand.

“When I first joined Marvel, Dan spent a lot of time talking me through his philosophy on what makes for a Marvel show,” Chory says. “Dan’s mantra is that it’s all about the villains. If they work, then the story will work. And he’s right. Just like Jeph, Dan is an amazing storyteller. And he clearly understands when to spend money on something and when not to. ”

While getting S.H.I.E.L.D. on the air was a major victory, Chory says it was the 2013 Netflix deal that really upgraded the TV industry’s view of Marvel. The initial agreement called for the studio to deliver four 13-episode series — Daredevil, Jessica Jones, Luke Cage and Iron Fist — culminating with The Defenders, the miniseries that would bring all the characters together.

“We weren’t doing a [broadcast-network] show,” Chory says. “Netflix gave us freedom from the traditional act breaks and rules and regulations that come with being on a network. We would get to tell stories over the course of 13 episodes and treat them like 13 hour-long movies broken up into three acts.”

The Marvel-Netflix deal was unlike any other in television, according to Loeb, because, “There’s never been a network that gives an order for five series and 60 episodes based largely on a belief in [the studio’s] brand.”

Allie Goss, Netflix’s vice-president of original series, insists the streaming service never saw partnering with Marvel as a risk — even though Loeb’s original pitch was cloaked in the sort of secrecy for which his company is famous. “It was very Marvel — we didn’t know what they were coming in to pitch.

We just knew it was a big idea,” she says. “Even when they told us the idea of these four characters and that they eventually team up, they didn’t go into all the details. The concept was basically that the characters would be grounded and a little darker than the feature films. If you sat next to any of them in a bar, it would feel normal.”

The plan seems to be working. Netflix doesn’t provide ratings, but it’s already aired a second season of Daredevil. A sophomore season of the Peabody Award–winning Jessica Jones is in production, and a new series, The Punisher, has been added to the mix. All this success, Buckley says, has “cemented us in television.”

In the beginning, he notes, outlets — including Netflix — were probably more interested in partnering with Marvel Television because of the reputation of the movie studio. “The studio has had a very quick success rate and continues to deliver quality product people want to see, which creates a thirst for the world of Marvel.”

Now that other networks have seen how Marvel works on the small screen, the studio isn’t just holding its own — it’s expanding the notion of what its shows can be. These days, it can deliver a surreal take on superheroes for FX’s more esoteric tastes (Legion) as well as the young-adult-friendly Cloak and Dagger for Freeform’s more youthful viewers.

As Marvel gradually expands into different outlets with different sensibilities, though, a new challenge has emerged. Loeb explains: “Because each network we’re working with has its own creative insights and perceptions of its brand, our job is to be creative with nuances in our shows that are tied to [the network’s own] tone.”

The goal is to continue taking chances in the same way Netflix first took a chance on Marvel. For example, the first two episodes of the upcoming series Inhumans were shot exclusively with IMAX cameras, and a version will premiere in IMAX theaters on September 1. And then, of course, in Legion, the focus has been on a character that even many diehard fans probably didn’t know.

Yet as tonally different as, say, Legion is from Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. , everything from Marvel Television will continue to have the same real-life relevance that, for one young fan in particular, made heroes of very unreal mutants, Norse gods and men flying around in armored suits.

“I loved that Peter Parker was unpopular, that Luke Cage couldn’t pay his rent, that Matt Murdock was Daredevil but didn’t think he could live up to what his father wanted him to be,” Loeb recalls. “Those were the things in the comics that affected me emotionally — and they’re the things in our TV stories that we try to make people aware of.

“One of the things that has always made Marvel Television different is, we’re far less interested in capes and cowls,” he adds. “Powers are interesting to show, but they’re just the icing on what is hopefully a well-baked and structured cake.”

This article originally appeared in emmy magazine, Issue No. 6, 2017