I don’t know if we’ll be getting a second season of Spider-Noir, but I’m grateful for the existence of this one.
And now for something completely different: a TV review.
I normally don’t do reviews — I consider myself hopeless as a critic unless the subject is music or MAGA — and I definitely don’t do reviews about superhero schlock. The Marvel/DC “comic book” movie and TV craze that swept over America like an unending Noachian flood (imagine those titanic waves on that planet in Interstellar, and that’s what the decade between 2008-2019 felt like, kids) was so culture-winnowing and intellect-destroying that I consider myself blessed by my stubborn ability to avoid nearly all of it. I’ve seen the original Iron Man (2008), Black Panther (2018) – its societal unavoidability at the time now feels like a clear premonition of Things to Come – and a couple of those early Netflix series. (The first season of The Punisher with Jon Bernthal was in fact pretty good — a lot of very bad people got very badly punished.)
And that’s it.
To have only seen three or four of these sorts of things over the last 20 years feels like a strange act of self-imposed isolation from a mainstream I used to happily participate in: I was consciously ducking out of American pop culture, such as it is, for the first time in my life. CGI explosions, quippy surface-level dialogue, and fantasy superpowers — these things may have spoken to an entire generation of filmgoers, but they profoundly bored me. (What I know about superhero movies comes almost exclusively from watching thoughtful YouTube critics like the RedLetterMedia crew or the Critical Drinker have at them — and witnessing the evolvingly despairing approaches of both to these sorts of films convinced me that I’d chosen wisely.)
So it’s only fitting that I found out about Spider-Noir, the recent Amazon Prime series starring Nicolas Cage as an aged alternate-universe Spiderman who works as a 1930s NYC gumshoe — yes I know it sounds strange, but bear with me for a moment — in the most “out-of-touch old man” way possible: via passing mention in a Wall Street Journal piece written by my friend Christopher Scalia. I’m glad that I did, because while I may not love superhero movies, I adore mid-century detective fiction and film noir.
And to my complete and utter shock, that’s basically what Spider-Noir is: authentically 80 percent Raymond Chandler and only 20 percent Stan Lee, a remarkably satisfying cocktail of hard-boiled gumshoe tropes laced with a splash of superhero silliness. I strongly recommend it to readers despite the loopiness of the premise, and you can watch it on Amazon Prime for free if you (like me) already pay to get your tube socks delivered overnight without shipping fees.
How to explain that premise, though? I only learned later that this concept had already been introduced in the animated film Into the Spiderverse (2018), which posits a multidimensional world where many different Spidermans exist in different timelines; all with different backstories, from different worlds and eras — species, even — but all sharing that essential good-hearted “Spiderman” spirit. (I learned this from my wife, who saw and very much enjoyed the film.)
Spider-Noir is about just one of those characters: Ben Reilly, a Peter Parker analogue who lives in the New York City of the 1930s, and retired from a career of superheroism as “The Spider” half a decade ago when he lost his version of the “Uncle Ben” character in this timeline (his girlfriend). Now he’s a hard-drinking, hard-aging private detective getting by on a shoestring income and the occasional, but reluctant, use of his spider-infused super-strength. (Cage voiced him in the original film, now he’s back to play him live-action.)
What’s remarkable about Spider-Noir is that — once the obligatory voiceover “backstory” prelude is quickly dispensed with — it’s easy to forget this show is about a superhero at all for long stretches. Instead it’s a classic set of noir tropes: a down-on-his-luck P.I. with a dark and tragic past gets a sleazy job — spy on a glamorous lounge singer to see who she may be cheating with — and gets drawn into a web (get it?) of lies, political intrigue, and criminal conspiracy. The city’s crime boss, its oleaginous mayor, and the chief of police are all implicated, and many will die before New York sees justice.
Plus, well . . . there are also superheroes and supervillains unleashing their superpowers upon the Depression-era Empire City. Aside from “The Spider” himself (currently retired), there’s an indestructible man made out of sand, a lizard-skinned brawler, and a sociopath who stores electrical charges only to unleash them down people’s throats. You would be surprised at how lightly the show wears all of this silliness — though it naturally waxes with the plot progression — by connecting all of these men to one another in a historically semi-grounded way.
And that brings me to the two prime virtues of Spider-Noir, in an age of increasing trash: the loving care put into the scripting and the quality acting. The show is both well-scripted and well-plotted — as a modern streaming show of the “eight episode” variety it is inevitably a bit overstuffed, but it avoids the “this should have been a two-hour movie” trap that most modern shows fall into by incorporating (and carefully developing) two separate intertwining plots. Again, without giving away too much, the “superhero” aspects of the show become more and more clear as the season progresses, but never to the point where they wholly overawe its fundamental noir quality.
Second, the acting turns are superb. Cage is not as random a choice as one might have assumed to play a noir-themed superhero: He has long been steeped in cinema history, from German Expressionism to its peculiarly American reflection: pre-WWII American B&W film noir. He is in his element here, playing a self-consciously assembled — the plotting is lovely on this point — fusion of Jimmy Cagney, Humphrey Bogart, plus an inevitable touch of Jimmy Stewart as well. (Cage by now naturally looks the part for this kind of role, disarmingly at times.)
Most importantly for anyone attempting a version of the Webslinger, in this universe or any alternate one: Cage delivers the well-penned snark and insouciant banter of this script with an agility that belies (and in fact mixes surprisingly well with) his age. Ben Reilly is rumpled, slowing down, and intensely reluctant to get involved in other people’s problems — he’s not strong in the sense that he can bash people through walls, he’s merely resilient, with sixth-sense reflexes — which makes him an ideal Marlowe-type noir protagonist. The classic Peter Parker would deliver snot-nosed quips in the old comic books with the confidence of a young man; Ben Reilly bats away threats from gangsters with the seen-it-all contempt of a man who will not give away the one thing he cares about: his integrity.
The supporting cast is remarkable as well: Brendan Gleeson, as the season’s overarching villain (no supervillain himself, just a well-drawn Irish gangster secretly running the city) is given spectacular dialogue to chew on and he savors every morsel. Lamorne Morris (who I know primarily as “Winston” from the underappreciated network comedy classic New Girl) plays Reilly’s journalist sidekick Robbie Robertson, one of the few friends who shares his secret. Meanwhile, Lukas Haas plays a mob capo actually named “Winston,” and anyone who recalls his memorable turn in 2005’s neo-noir classic Brick will instantly appreciate how much he’s enjoying recreating the same vibe 20 years later.
Finally, Li Jun Li has a particularly difficult dramatic thread to navigate in Spider-Noir — she initially comes across as the Barbara Stanwyck-like femme fatale, but her story unfolds into much more sympathetic places — and she walks an unforgiving tightrope by delivering a strikingly naturalistic emotional performance, one that hits unexpectedly nuanced beats — and all in a Marvel Comics television show. She is allowed to make the most of this role because Spider-Noir shares vastly more DNA with Double Indemnity and The Big Sleep than it does with radioactive spiders, and most of all because the dialogue and banter in this show is unusually well-written to fit the period.
A final note, and perhaps an added recommendation in its own way. Since Spider-Noir is so obviously a tribute to the look and feel of classic film noir, it is being offered by Amazon in two formats: standard color (or “true-hued color,” as they amusingly label it) and black and white. I cannot emphasize enough that this show should be watched in black and white. It was clearly filmed with an intentional eye toward B&W, with its emphasis on light and shadow, and on recreating the compositions of classic noir scenes from cinema history. Why, you’ll almost forget you’re watching a show about modern demigods.
I don’t know if we’ll be getting a second season of Spider-Noir — the budgets on these sorts of things are massive for Amazon — but I’m grateful for the existence of this one. I saw what Paramount did to the Star Trek franchise, and it made me cry. But Spiderman has some life left in him yet, and in the most unexpected way: Nicolas Cage may be 62 years old, but he has a healthy future in crime-detecting if he wants to pursue it.