Luke Cage On Netflix Has New England Roots
The new Netflix series Luke Cage debuted Friday, Sept. 30, and it continues the tradition of the streaming network knocking it out of the park with Marvel characters. But this article isn’t a review — that spoiler-free opinion piece will come later.
No, in this article I will point out how I came to realize that the executive producer and primary writer Cheo Hodari Coker had to be from New England.
Much has been written about how Coker has made Luke Cage a distinctive series based on his own experiences. One article describes how the former award-winning hip-hop music journalist titles each episode with the name of a Gang Starr track. Another explains how both Marvel executives and the cast reacted to the fairly common use in the show of the n-word.
But very early on in the show I started to suspect that Coker might be from New England. In a show set in Harlem in New York, about a main character not from NYC or New England, a Harlem-native character starts going on exuberantly about the Boston Celtics. Throughout the course of the 13 episodes, that name dropping of something associated with New England happened again and again.
Finally I had to look up the possible source of this love for New England, and it turns out Coker is from the home of the University of Connecticut, the town of Storrs. While he apparently now lives in Seattle, lived in New York during his journalism career and went to college in California at Stanford University, he is a New England native.
Below is a list of as many of the references I can recall without watching every episode again. Let me know which ones I missed in the comments below, but without any spoilers or reference to when they happened. No spoilers ever.
- Boston Celtics
- Robert Parrish
- Kevin McHale
- K.C. Jones
- Doc Rivers
- Dennis Lehane
- Live Free or Die
- New Hampshire
- Harvard
- Dunkin Donuts
I am sure I’m missing some, so help me out if you’ve seen the whole series. And keep an ear out for the ones above as you watch the show if you haven’t had the wonderful experience yet.
