Echo co-director and executive producer Sydney Freeland shares how Marvel crafted its first “Mature Audience Only” show, stating that they didn’t even intend to create an MCU series that will mark plenty of firsts for the studio.
Starring Alaqua Cox as Maya Lopez, the first MCU deaf and Native American character, the five-episode series is also the first Marvel show to ever receive a TV-MA rating. In an interview with Deadline, Freeland explained how her team creatively crafted the MCU miniseries.
“We did not set out to make a TV-MA show, but we did know it was going to be grounded. It was going to be gritty. It was going to be a little more visceral and street level, and the question was just, how [far] can we go? For myself, I’m down to go as far as [I can]. I want to push the envelope as far as Marvel will let me,” said Freeland.
Fortunately, according to Freeland, the studio allowed them to go as far as they wanted to.
“If Maya is going to come into Kingpin’s fold to the point where she’s being taken in as his niece, almost like an unhealthy father-daughter dynamic, she has to do something that’s going to put her on his radar. All roads lead to that. You have to have that. So with that, then the conversation is becomes ‘Well, okay, so how can we do this? How can we show this?’ She’s got to do some dirty work, you know? She has to show a certain degree of ruthlessness that that Kingpin would identify with and gravitate towards. So all those things just sort of contribute to creating something that was more graphic,” Freeland concluded.