In the first episode of Daredevil: Born Again on Disney+, Karen Page (Deborah Ann Woll) teases best friends Matt Murdock (Charlie Cox) and Foggy Nelson (Elden Henson) about their tendency to indulge in nostalgia for the pre-gentrification days of Hell’s Kitchen. “Not nostalgia,” Foggy insists. “Reverence for the past, yet hope for the future.”
It’s an apt choice to begin the series, which sees Cox, Woll, Henson, and others reprising their roles from the mid-2010s Netflix Daredevil series, where Matt split his time between his legal practice with Foggy and his extracurricular work as the red-clad vigilante. The Netflix show is considered by many comics fans to be the high point of the first wave of Marvel Comics TV adaptations from that decade, which for the most part have been treated by current Marvel management as if they never happened. Marvel nerds may not feel nostalgia for some of the other shows of that phase, like Iron Fist or Helstrom, but there was audible excitement in theaters when Cox cameo-ed as Matt in Spider-Man: No Way Home, along with a hope for a future where the better parts of that era don’t have to be snapped out of existence, Thanos-style.
Born Again, though, feels caught between past and future — in its relationship to the Netflix show, in the tug of war between two different creative teams, and in the larger picture of Marvel Television. It has some exciting moments, and strong performances from Cox and several other Netflix alums, including Vincent D’Onofrio as Wilson Fisk, aka the Kingpin of crime, and Jon Bernthal as Frank Castle, aka the Punisher. But as a whole, it’s a Frankenstein monster of a season, with various parts stitched together in ungainly fashion.
It is, in other words, the inevitable end product of a filmmaking approach that has gradually proven untenable, even if it has roots in the comic book publishing origins of characters like Daredevil and Kingpin.
Because Stan Lee was working on so many different Marvel Comics titles at the same time in the early Sixties that birthed Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four, the Avengers, and so many more iconic characters, he simply didn’t have time to write full scripts for them the way comic book scribes usually did at the start of the process. Instead, he would hand artistic collaborators like Steve Ditko and Jack Kirby the broadest of outlines and invite them to plot out each issue as they drew them. Then, once they gave him back the illustrated pages, Lee would come up with dialogue and captions to match — or, at times, would use those elements to change the artists’ intention to something he preferred. It was an unpredictable, at times combustible approach that contributed as much to the energy of those classic Marvel Comics as the ideas that Lee, Kirby, and the others were throwing into them. Though Lee didn’t invent this particular workflow, he made it famous, eventually dubbing it “the Marvel Method.”
The Marvel Method endured for many years after Lee stopped actively co-writing most of Marvel’s line, and is still used on occasion today. For the most part, though, the comics business realized at some point that it was usually better — and almost always easier — for the writer to have the whole story planned out before the artist began drawing it.
Kevin Feige, who for nearly two decades has played the role of Stan Lee in Marvel’s ascension to the dominant force in modern filmmaking, gradually came up with his own version of Lee’s approach. Let’s call it “the Marvel Cinematic Universe Method.” In this Method, writers and directors are assigned to individual films or shows, but rarely are they empowered the way they might be in a traditional studio ecosystem. Like Stan Lee looking at what Jack Kirby or Don Heck drew, and only then deciding what the story was definitively about, Feige likes to figure out projects once they get into post-production, often requiring reshoots to help shape the preexisting footage into the shape Feige and the other MCU execs eventually settle on.
While that unconventional technique worked like gangbusters from the first Iron Man film through Avengers: Endgame, it’s proved less effective in recent films. And the MCU Method is even more antithetical to the way television has been made, with a single producer — usually a show’s creator and chief writer — getting to call the shots. Since Feige took over Marvel’s TV operation, starting with The Falcon and the Winter Soldier and WandaVision, it’s been more of an assembly line process: writers turn in scripts, then step away while directors shoot the episodes, and they in turn yield to Feige and his team as they decide what they want the show to actually be, in theme and tone. Some of the Marvel series made for Disney+, like WandaVision and, more recently, Agatha All Along, have done exciting work within this broad structure(*). But as later series — and even follow-ups to once-promising shows like Loki — have disappointed, it’s been hard to look at Feige’s TV output without thinking that the MCU Method was an attempt to fix a way of making TV that wasn’t all that broken.
(*) Just as the most distinctive films made under the MCU Method have had directors like James Gunn and Taika Waititi with stronger authorial voices, the stronger MCU shows have often been ones like WandaVision, where the writer and director continued to collaborate even after their respective parts of the job were theoretically finished.
Deborah Ann Woll and Charlie Cox in Daredevil: Born Again. Giovanni Rufino/MARVEL
Which brings us to Daredevil: Born Again. Both Matt and Fisk have already had soft relaunches: Matt in his civilian identity in No Way Home, and in a more brightly-colored costume (and mood to match) in a few episodes of She-Hulk: Attorney at Law; Fisk as the literal heavy in both Hawkeye and Echo. There was some ambiguity as to whether they were meant to be the exact same versions of Daredevil and Kingpin the actors had played on Netflix. And even when Born Again was first written by Chris Ord and Matt Corman, no one at Marvel had decided for sure if this was a continuation of the Netflix show(*), or a multiversal variant of sorts.
(*) The third Netflix season already adapted the bulk of the actual “Born Again” arc from the comics, where Fisk discovered Daredevil’s secret identity, and used that knowledge to destroy Matt’s life.
But Marvel halted production in the summer of 2023, replaced Ord and Corman with Dario Scardapane — an alum of Netflix’s Daredevil spinoff, The Punisher — and announced that, actually, their executives now understood that having a showrunner was, in fact, a good idea.
But because the majority of the nine-episode first season had already been filmed — Scardapane has said that only the first, eighth, and ninth episodes were made entirely by his team — Born Again turns out to not be an ideal test of what an MCU series made by an old-fashioned showrunner will look like. It keeps lurching back and forth between its competing creative visions, with Scardapane having to work around the story ideas and new characters he inherited from his predecessors.
Among the reported reasons Ord and Corman were ousted was that Matt didn’t appear in costume until the season’s fourth episode. Scardapane seems to have learned that lesson, as the show now begins with an elaborate battle between Daredevil and his lethal rival Bullseye (Wilson Bethel). The Netflix show’s greatest strength was its lavishly choreographed fight scenes, and at least once per season, viewers would be treated to a brawl presented as a oner (aka looking like it was shot in a single take), like Matt trapped in a prison riot. This Daredevil/Bullseye clash is also a oner, though it’s simultaneously more ambitious and less intense than previous fights: the camera keeps panning away from the two combatants, which shows the collateral damage being left in their wake, but which also gives the stuntmen, and the audience, periodic breathers from the mayhem.
Between the prolonged fight and a chance to watch Matt, Karen, and Foggy banter again, Born Again very much feels like old times for a while. But Woll and Henson are written out after the first episode. And ironically, the various subplots Scardapane added to Ord and Corman’s story — most of them, like tension between Fisk and his wife Vanessa (Ayelet Zurer), designed to more definitively link the old show to the new one — now means that we don’t see Matt in costume again until the sixth episode.
There’s still action before we get there, because Matt Murdock ultimately can’t help himself from beating up bad people, even when he’s trudging through a frustratingly long Refusing the Call arc. The season’s midpoint is a largely standalone story where an uncostumed Matt has to help a supporting character from another MCU show(*) foil a bank robbery. It’s the kind of self-contained hour that so many of these Marvel shows — both in the Netflix era and the Disney+ one — have desperately needed to do, but have rarely attempted(**). And it’s nimble and fun in a way that much of Born Again struggles to be while juggling a bunch of arcs of varying degrees of interest.
(*) This is a TV-MA show, with graphic language and often grisly violence. So the occasional crossovers with, or even references to, the more all-ages shows elsewhere on Disney+, creates some tonal dissonance. (And parents of fans of those shows should be warned that this one is decidedly not for kids.)
(**) Imagine how much the pacing problems on Jessica Jones or Luke Cage (or, for that matter, Daredevil) would have been eased simply by devoting a few episodes at the start of each season to our heroes working cases that had nothing to do with the latest big bads.
From left: Daredevil/Matt Murdock (Charlie Cox) and Kingpin/Wilson Fisk (Vincent D’Onofrio) Giovanni Rufino/MARVEL
There is, for instance, a lengthy stretch where Born Again just wants to be a legal drama set in a superhero universe, where Matt’s new criminal defense client, Hector Ayala (Kamar de los Reyes), turns out to be obscure Marvel vigilante White Tiger. This is mostly leftover material from Ord and Corman’s tenure, but as combined with the new stuff, it’s not an especially good legal drama. Various developments in the case are raced through; when Matt pulls an unconventional courtroom stunt, the prosecutor threatens to respond with rhetorical guns a-blazin’ and… it just never happens.
Meanwhile, Matt has a new legal partner, Kirsten McDuffie (Nikki M. James), and a new romantic partner, in therapist/author Heather Glenn (Margarita Levieva). Plus he has retired cop Cherry (Clark Johnson) working as his investigator and keeping him apprised of Fisk’s latest shenanigans. Each actor has their moments working alongside Cox (Johnson especially), but all three characters are awfully thin, and whenever someone from the Netflix run returns — like an emotionally charged argument between Matt and Punisher star Jon Bernthal as lethal vigilante Frank Castle — it makes the newbies feel like placeholders.
The weakest of the Netflix seasons was its second, where D’Onofrio was largely absent while Fisk was stuck behind bars. So it’s not surprising that the most effective story of the new season involves Fisk running for mayor of New York. The echoes of our current political situation are unmistakable — half of the city can’t believe the other half would even consider voting for this guy, Fisk has no interest in following norms or laws if they don’t serve his agenda or tantrums — but D’Onofrio has made Fisk such a fascinatingly self-pitying creation(*) that it nonetheless feels specific to him. (The political campaign also features one of the more effective new cast additions in Michael Gandolfini as Daniel, a Fisk fanboy who keeps rising in his political organization because the Kingpin values loyalty above all else.)
(*) Have someone love you as much as Wilson Fisk loves to begin autobiographical monologues with a wistful, “When I was a boy…”
When Fisk is staring down Matt, when Matt and Frank are angrily debating vigilante philosophy, or when Matt reluctantly gets back into action, Born Again evokes the better parts of the original Netflix run. But it’s hard to find any big picture MCU takeaways from this product of two competing visions. Let’s wait and see them put out a season of television made with a single showrunner the entire time. And if they want to be sure to sprinkle in multiple Superhero Mission of the Week episodes, so much the better.
The first two episodes of Daredevil: Born Again are now streaming on Disney+, with additional episodes releasing weekly. I’ve seen all nine.
