What is it about the character Daredevil that drives creators to do some of their best work? Perhaps it’s the looming legacy of Frank Miller and his game-changing run on the comics in the ’80s that has weighed so heavily on nearly every creator since. Perhaps it’s the mythical quality of the character baked into his origin by Stan Lee and Bill Everett, a blind lawyer who fights in courtrooms by day, on the streets at night; a religious man dressed as the Devil of Hell’s Kitchen.
Whatever it is about the Man Without Fear that drives comic book creators to do their best work, the same ethos has spilled over onto TV. The original three seasons of Netflix’s Daredevil are often lauded as some of the best superhero TV of all time. And like the comics before them, each season was defined by a different showrunner, a different aesthetic, a different focus on Daredevil and his supporting cast.
Thankfully, the same high level of precision Daredevil uses to aim his batons is brought, once again, to the Disney+ revival Daredevil: Born Again. It’s not just a great season of television, it’s the best live-action project Marvel Studios has made so far.
It’s also a minor miracle that it works at all. Whatever you think about the Netflix/Marvel era, that was often defined by the story happening outside of the shows, rather than on-screen itself. A reported cold war between Marvel Studios (who is responsible for the MCU), and Marvel Television (which was in charge of the Netflix shows, among others) led to the eventual dissolution of the division, and a brand new era for Marvel TV on Disney+.
That, along with the whole narrative about the MCU (Marvel Cinematic Universe) since 2019, has not quite panned out as the better alternative to what came before. While there have been creative highs from WandaVision to the first season of Loki, and your mileage may vary on the rest, it’s been a clear and public learning process from Marvel Studios that jamming out multiple seasons of TV structured and budgeted as mini-movies, in between multiple movies in theaters, has led to a fizzling of the brand.
In a come to Jesus moment after the failure of Secret Invasion, Marvel once again split into Marvel Television, Marvel Animation, and Marvel Studios — all still under impresario Kevin Feige, but giving a clear focus to the different mediums, rather that tossing a Marvel label on the front and hoping for the best. For Marvel Television, that meant the revolutionary idea of having showrunners in charge, coming up with show bibles, and aiming to create series that can maintain multiple seasons, rather than six episodes between major motion pictures. You know: television.
Daredevil: Born Again is the first show to see the benefits of this approach, and if this is a vision of the future of Marvel Television? Oh, we are so back.
Initially planned as an 18-episode season, the show was halted mid-production thanks to the SAG-AFTRA strike, and over-went a near complete creative overhaul. Dario Scardapane, who previously worked on The Punisher series for Netflix, was brought in as showrunner. Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead, who previously worked on Loki and Moon Knight, were brought in as new directors for the series. Rather than a complete reboot of Daredevil set in the MCU, actors from the previous iteration of the universe were brought back, ties to the three seasons tightened, and though footage from the initially shot episodes is still being used, the end result is far more revival than reboot.
While you still can occasionally see the seams — one episode mid-run in the season feels like it almost entirely comes from a different show — the end result is a minor miracle that clearly sits in the MCU, but also picks up directly from Daredevil Seasons 1-3, as well as the events of Hawkeye and Echo. References to Spider-Man and Ms. Marvel make the show feel like it’s part of a larger universe than just the street-level Netflix heroes, while the show itself keeps razor focused on Daredevil (Charlie Cox) and his world.
Actually, that’s not entirely true. While there are plenty of other characters in Daredevil’s orbit, the nine episodes of Season 1 (the entire season was provided for critics, in a clear show of confidence from Marvel) are essentially a two-hander between the two best elements of the previous seasons: Cox’s Matt Murdock, and Vincent D’Onofrio’s Wilson Fisk/Kingpin.
Given nearly equal time on screen, the show follows the duo from an inciting tragedy in the first episode that forces Matt out of the costume (again), while Fisk reinvents himself as the Mayor of New York City. For the former, he’s making a firm commitment to justice through the law, not his fists. For the latter, the same, as he is seemingly on the straight and narrow, trying to make New York better through leading, rather than bullying.
It’s clearly only a matter of time until they both fall back into bad habits, but the series effectively spins that out over the season, making it a guessing game when the mask of normalcy will fall. It’s a tribute to the talent of these actors, as well as the direction and writing that Cox and D’Onofrio barely share scenes, but the tension between them can be felt all the way from Upper Manhattan to downtown in City Hall at all times.
While this is a direct continuation of Netflix’s Daredevil, complete with the return of Karen Page (Deborah Ann Woll), Foggy Nelson (Elden Henson), Frank Castle/The Punisher (Jon Bernthal), and more, it earns the “Born Again” moniker. We get new law offices, a new supporting cast, and most notably the visual style of the series is reinvented, once again. Benson and Moorhead’s visual acumen can be felt throughout the series, littered throughout with shaky handheld camera work walking behind New Yorkers that feels like B-roll but pays off in the series in a surprising way. When Matt uses his enhanced hearing, the widescreen frame will sometimes widen out to full 4:3, then narrow again when enemy forces are closing in.
And special note should be made of the sound throughout the series, which varies in volumes and even directionally, making the viewer feel like they are hearing the world just like Daredevil. This is a rare case of “maybe you want to watch this on your laptop with some good headphones” instead of “watch it on the biggest screen possible.”
Of the supporting cast, the best and most improved returnee is Ayelet Zurer as Vanessa Fisk. The role was originally recast for the reboot version, with Zurer brought back from the first three seasons thanks to the creative overhaul. This might be the single best decision the production made. D’Onofrio becomes a vulnerable little boy around Zurer’s Vanessa — but for the first time in three seasons, she’s not just Wilson’s marriage partner, she’s his business equal. Simmering tension between the two, and some early revelations of how their marriage is falling apart powers a fair amount of the drama, and one of the wildest scenes late in the season. It’s actually incomprehensible to think how this season would have worked without Zurer — she’s so crucial to everything that happens, and her chemistry (frosty or otherwise) with D’Onofrio is real and on display.
Margarita Levieva as Matt’s new love interest Heather Glenn, a therapist, is nicely integrated into the overall plot of the season. Less so is Nikki M. James Kirsten McDuffie, Matt’s new law partner, who is mostly relegated to the “I’m worried about you, Matt,” role. Clark Johnson’s Cherry, an investigator working for Murdock and McDuffie is an exposition machine, but he’s also a nice calming presence, an adult among the squabbling children. And Zabryna Guevara gives a great performance as seasoned political operator Sheila Rivera, slowly bullied and beaten down by Fisk’s outside the box (read: dangerous) thinking.
It’s Michael Gandolfini who makes the biggest impression of the new cast as Daniel Blake, a young protege of Fisk’s who — not surprisingly, given he’s James Gandolfini’s son — ably slips into the role of de facto son of a dangerous mobster (and perhaps, some might speculate, actual son). The late Kamar de los Reyes also impresses as a conflicted and earnest vigilante known as White Tiger. And while he doesn’t get nearly the same amount to do as he did in Daredevil Season 3, Wilson Bethel is also a welcome return as the horrifyingly deadly Benjamin “Dex” Poindexter, now fully embracing his identity as Daredevil’s arch-enemy, Bullseye.
The show is also, to note, often extremely darkly funny. While it’s not a laugh-a-minute, it also eschews the “so that just happened” style of jokes that pervades most of the MCU in favor of pitch black moments that are either so horrifying or purposefully soulless you have no choice but to laugh out loud. A lot of that is up to Gandolfini’s Staten Island goofball delivery, as well as Wilson Fisk being forced into increasingly banal situations due to his status as mayor (a sequence where he sits in a classroom listening to kids off-tune singing “We Built This City” goes on so long it starts to feel like a Tim Robinson sketch). But the humor also bleeds into Matt Murdock’s often more serious storyline. Yes his morose and brooding, like any good streetwise vigilante. But he also cracks jokes and smiles, like a real person. The scripts smartly know that just like in the comics, Murdock uses humor to defer any questions about his personal life, and that’s what we get here.
Not everything works in the show, mind you, and unfortunately the fight scenes — arguably the best part of the Netflix series — aren’t always up to snuff. In particular whenever Daredevil is in costume leaping and swinging over rooftops, it switches to jarring CGI that seems incongruous with the otherwise grounded nature of the filming. Same with spurts of extremely fake blood punctuating battles with The Punisher, in particular. Though adequate, the fight scenes are mostly chopped up, covering the moves of the actors (or stuntmen) involved. An attempt early in the first episode to ape the iconic “one-shot” fight scenes from the original show is well-blocked, but poorly lit and not nearly as visceral as anything in the original series. It’s good news then that the dramatic parts are so engrossing, though perhaps the fights are something to work on for the currently in production second season of the show.
And on that note, perhaps the best, most laudable part of Daredevil: Born Again is that it is, indeed a TV show. While some Marvel shows have been episodic, they’ve still essentially functioned as one eighth of a movie. Daredevil: Born Again has an overall season long story that pays off in spectacular fashion, and leads directly into the second season. But each episode has its own themes, its own ideas, and varies in length from 40 minutes to a full hour depending on how long it takes to tell the emotional arc of Matt and Wilson, as well as those orbiting in their worlds.
It may have taken a few years to figure it all out, but Marvel is finally back to making honest to god television, for the television, and all it took was bringing back the Man Without Fear the way fans, critics, and the material demanded. Or in five simple words? Marvel TV is born again.
Daredevil: Born Again Premiere Dates And Episode Guide:
New episodes of Daredevil: Born Again premiere on Tuesdays on Disney+ at 9pm ET / 6pm PT.
Here’s the full list of episodes in Daredevil: Born Again Season 1 with premiere dates:
- Tuesday, March 4, 2025: Daredevil: Born Again, Season 1, Episode 1
- Tuesday, March 4, 2025: Daredevil: Born Again, Season 1, Episode 2
- Tuesday, March 11, 2025: Daredevil: Born Again, Season 1, Episode 3
- Tuesday, March 18, 2025: Daredevil: Born Again, Season 1, Episode 4
- Tuesday, March 25, 2025: Daredevil: Born Again, Season 1, Episode 5
- Tuesday, March 25, 2025: Daredevil: Born Again, Season 1, Episode 6
- TBA: Daredevil: Born Again, Season 1, Episode 7
- TBA: Daredevil: Born Again, Season 1, Episode 8
- TBA: Daredevil: Born Again, Season 1, Episode 9 *Season Finale*
Where To Watch Daredevil: Born Again
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