The Creator and main writer of Luke Cage was an English Major and it shows. This series had all drama and excitement of a college thesis. It's great that he referenced the great black mystery writer Walter Mosley and other masters of the genre like Dennis Lehane but that's as close to greatness he ever got. This show had some the most inept and amateurish writing of any Marvel franchise EVER. The dialogue was so predictable you could say the words along with the actors as they were speaking.Scene after scene had the characters DISCUSSING, the same issue over and over again where NOTHING happened. These writers failed to understand the most basic tenet of screen writing which requires CONFLICT.I don't mean physical fighting but mental and intellectual sparring with the characters inner life and struggles coming through in their subtext – what they're thinking and not saying. There was zero subtext in almost every scene. On top of that their efforts at humor and wit were a bunch of tired old sayings and jokes we've heard a thousand time.
As for the actors, with the exception of the always terrific Rosario Dawson, Simone Missick, Frank Whalley and Mahershala Ali, this series had some of the most inept and awful acting I have ever seen on TV. Mike Colter's heavy breathing and grimacing to show emotion and Alfre Woodward's head-shaking-always-on-the-verge-of-tears fake emoting were amateurish at best. Don't even get me started on Karen Pittman's horrendous dragon lady performance of Inspector Ridley.
One could forgive a lot if the show hadn't been so deadly dull.It's a real indictment of the writing when you can fast forward through most of every episode and not miss a thing in the story which unfortunately was the only way to get through this interminable slog. Binge watching? Hell, it was more like cringe watching.
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