Back in 2015, Marvel Studios and Netlix launched a group of TV series featuring some of Marvel’s “street level” superhero characters. Set in New York City, these heroes didn’t have the powers that would bring them into conflict with genocidal cyborgs or intergalactic tyrants that those other guys and gals in the Avengers would fight on the big screen. Instead, they focused more on things like drug trafficking and organized crime, tring to make their Manhattan neighborhoods better places. The lead off show centered on the hero Daredevil, in reality blind lawyer Matt Murdoch who, thanks to getting accidentally splashed with some radioactive goop, had his other four senses heightened to such an extreme that they compensated for his lack of sight. (Radiation was a quick-fire way to get any kind of super powers back in the 1960s when Marvel was creating a number of their characters.) Armed only with his martial arts fighting skills, he would go out at night to bring his sense of justice to Midtown’s Hell’s Kitchen when the judicial system would fail to.
Daredevil, and the shows that followed, were grittier and thematically much darker than their big screen counterparts, thanks to their somewhat segregation off to streaming. It was the darker, noir-ish themes that resonated with many fans, and when the shows were canceled and later removed from Netflix when Disney launched their own competing streaming service, those fans lobbied for a return of Daredevil and the other characters introduced in those series. Now, after having him make a few cameo appearances in a couple of film and television Marvel Cinematic Universe projects over the past couple of years, Matt Murdock/Daredevil is back in his own series again for Disney+, the aptly titled Daredevil: Born Again.
To put fans’ most basic fear to rest first – although this show sports a new creative team driving the storytelling, it does feel very much a piece with the original three-season long series. Granted some time has past for Murdoch and those around him, but the characterizations here are definitely a continuation of what has come before. Murdoch (Charlie Cox) and his friends and co-partners in their law firm Foggy Nelson (Elden Hensen) and Karen Page (Deborah Ann Woll) are helping where they can both in the court room and, in Murdoch’s case, outside of it. But as comics fans will probably tell you, Murdoch is never destined to enjoy happiness for long, and the first episode of this new series opens with a segment that showcase’s the same type of bone crunching fight choreography as seen in the original Netflix Daredevil but which ends in a way that propels Murdoch on his new journey. Meanwhile, after recuperating from an injury received in the Disney+ series Echo, Wilson Fisk, aka the Kingpin, (Vincent D’Onofrio) has returned to New York City with an eye on politics. Even though both characters tell the other that they have given up their former lives, it is just inevitable that they are going to clash.
Daredevil: Born Again is at its heart a tale of corruption and redemption. The corrupt Fisk feels he can somehow redeem New York City, delivering it from the criminals he sees as running rampant, and in doing so provide some redemption for himself. Murdoch, meanwhile, is a man struggling with his own demons, the same as he always has. The new show does, with the exception of one episode, somewhat downplay how he relies on his religious convictions in this inner conflict as compared to the previous incarnation, which is a shame. But really this is one of the only things on the negative side of the ledger.
Unintendedly, Daredevil: Born Again does carry a bit of resonance to the current political clime. Fisk runs a populist, get-it-done mayoral candidate, all but literally promising to make New York City great again. The population of Manhattan seem split on his candidacy with some seeing the allegations about his past as a detriment to a job in civil service while others see his transgressions as a plus. Granted as the show was shot across parts of 2023 and early 2024, so there was no real intention to speak to this moment, but it is interesting how circumstances have given some of the main storylines more heft.
