The showrunner and primary scriptwriter of the Jessica Jones TV series is Melissa Rosenberg.
She talks quite a lot about her creative process, including how she goes about adapting graphic novels for TV in this interview with the LA Times. You may wish to note that the original author of the 'Alias Investigations' comic serial (and creator of the "Purple Man", on whom Kilgrave was loosely based) was Brian Michael Bendis
Did you always see Purple Man as your villain?
I always did. He was in the comic book and I really embraced that. It was such a delicious character and he has so much to do with Jessica's own psyche and where we start with her, so I always wanted to pursue that.
You're so familiar with doing adaptations, how do you go about taking elements of a source material and making it your own?
Since the "Twilight" experience was kind of the opposite of "Jessica Jones" on so many levels, but certainly in pure structure and adaptation. With "Twilight" it was like, "How do I get this 500-page novel into a 110-page script?" With comics, there's a very minimalist quality to them and there's not a lot of story there to fill 13 hours.
What I'm constantly doing, what we did throughout the first 13 hours, you would take a nugget from the comic book and expand upon it. It's like taking little short stories and turning them into films, so you're constantly filling in.
We did that with "Dexter" as well. You have one novel and then you have 12 hours to fill in, so there's just constant enriching, complicating, and finding interesting new connections.
From the original comics, which began in 2001, did you find that a lot of that material needed to be updated for modern audiences? Fifteen years may not seem like a long time, but culturally a lot has changed with how people interact.
What I mostly used from the comics is the characters. The comics live in a different Marvel universe than the Marvel Cinematic Universe, so the mythology is different; so in the comic, everyone in the city is aware of superheroes and they're an everyday thing and the entire subject is about humans vs. supers and that's just not the world of the cinematic universe and definitely not the world here. So all of that storytelling goes away.
What remains is this character and her damage, so that changes in terms of having to create a three-dimensional version of her but that didn't really change because he's really beautifully drawn her, literally and figuratively.
That being said, Rosenberg is very open about using a "writing room" to supplement her own scriptwork
Luke Cage is a major character on the series. How did you create that
character, knowing he’s going off to lead his own series? Yeah, we
were deep into writing the show before Cheo came aboard to do his
series. He and I haven’t really talked at all. The one who was keeping
me honest was again Jeph Loeb, and one of my writers, co-executive
producer, Scott Reynolds, is a huge Luke Cage fan. So they were all
kind of protecting the Luke Cage brand in writing him in the room.
and
“It was an aggressive effort,” Rosenberg says. “We brought female
directors on, we made sure the writing room was diverse and that the
cast was very equal.” (Three out of its six directors are female.)
