Melissa Rosenberg Talks AKA JESSICA JONES & PENOZA

With the Twilight saga drawing to a close, Melissa Rosenberg is already developing her next projects, among them two interesting female-led dramas that we’re monitoring here at Seriable — AKA Jessica Jones and Penoza, both in the works at ABC.

AKA Jessica Jones is about a former superheroine with post traumatic stress disorder, who hangs up her costume to become a private eye. While Penoza is the story of an assassinated criminal’s widow who is forced to take over her late husband’s role in a bid to protect her family. Plenty of juicy story and character potential there.

Rosenberg shed some light of both projects in an interview with Movieline, where she explains what sets AKA apart from NBC’s failed Wonder Woman project and why Penoza is not too far removed from AMC’s Breaking Bad. Here are the quotables:

What hooked you on doing Jessica Jones, especially in the wake of the failed Wonder Woman series?
I think one of the major differences between Wonder Woman and Jessica Jones is that Wonder Woman is iconic and much better known, so you get into a lot of ridiculous expectations, like what’s her costume going to look like? Well, nobody knows who Jessica Jones is, except for fangirls and boys. So we have more freedom to actually bring the character to the screen in a way with a lot fewer expectations. The other side of that is we’ll have to earn fans as opposed to having them already in place.
But I think there’s also another element of Wonder Woman vs. Jessica Jones; I find Jessica Jones a much more interesting character to write for than Wonder Woman. Wonder Woman is so noble and heroic, and I don’t find that as interesting as one who’s really damaged and flawed and has post-traumatic stress disorder. Her superpowers are kind of B-level, they’re not all that great. [Laughs] I just find that much more interesting, you know? It’s like she’s not quite cutting it in the superhero world, she’s a little too weird to be in the human world, so she ends up straddling both.

The concept of Penoza, which is adapted from the Dutch series, sounds something like a Breaking Bad meets Mob Wives.
[Laughs] That’s not bad! That’s not a bad comparison. For me, it is a fantastic role for some fantastic actress for us to bring in from features, very much like Glenn Close in Damages or Kyra Sedgwick [in The Closer]. It gives them something really great to play, and this role is so complex. What I love about it is that it’s not about the sins of the father; her husband, who is killed – yes, he was a criminal. But she was equally as guilty in that she let it happen. She stood by. She was complacent, she condoned it. And so it’s the sin of the mother in that regard, and that’s what I’m interested in exploring. I love that as a theme for women: Stop standing by! You’ve got to make stuff happen! You’ve got to create your own world because if you let other people do it, they’re going to just screw you. So it’s really about a woman taking the reins of her life, having been put in this position by her own complacency and now stepping up.

You can read more from Rosenberg’s interview at Movie Line.

Interesting stuff. We’ll continue to keep you updated on both AKA Jessica Jones and Penoza.

Follow @Seriable

Tagged as: aka jessica jones, interviews, melissa rosenberg, penoza