When Netflix’s Daredevil premiered back in 2015, it felt like a breath of somber, brutal fresh air at a time when superhero fare was leaning more toward fantastic and generally lighthearted projects. In the years since the show’s end, other works like Deadpool and The Boys have delivered their own kind of comic book grit and violence, but there’s still a great fondness for seeing Matt Murdock (Charlie Cox) flip around, throw his sticks at people, and generally brutalize them like the maniac he is.
Daredevil: Born Again knows it has a legacy to live up to, and that audiences have been gradually drip-fed the title character’s return in recent years with Spider-Man: No Way Home, She-Hulk: Attorney at Law, and Echo. Whereas the latter framed Matt as a force of nature that Maya Lopez barely managed to escape from, the new show opens by taking a page from Matt’s brief Spider-Man movie cameo and showing how well he’s doing for himself. He, Karen Page (Deborah Ann Woll), and Foggy Nelson (Elden Henson) remain an effective trio at their firm and have plenty of friends they can hang with at their classic haunt, Josie’s Bar. Things are going great…
And then, things go wrong. Foggy is shot by Bullseye (Wilson Bethel), leaving Matt in such a fraught state he’s given up being Daredevil a year later and focused entirely on being a lawyer. With Karen having left town after Foggy’s death, Matt and the audience find themselves without his classic support system, those roles now filled by firm partner Kirsten McDuffie (Nikki M. James) and Cherry (Clark Johnson), a retired cop who learned Matt’s secret seconds after he’d thrown Bullseye off the roof and onto the street below, just feet away from Karen and Foggy’s corpse.
After that cold open, Born Again jumps ahead a year to show Matt trying his best to move on from Foggy’s death. The new status quo makes for a different type of show, with a brighter color palette and a bigger emphasis on Matt as a lawyer that happens to be a superhero. Early episodes revolve around either his current case—with clients introduced through their plight first before Matt comes into the picture—or non-vigilante problems, like getting more money for his firm. This is a full-on weekly TV show, a format which fits the character pretty well. The lawyer scenes let Matt flex his legal muscles in a way the original Daredevil didn’t always allow, and each episode provides plenty of moments for Matt to use his enhanced senses just enough to help in his daily life without fully going back to his old vigilante ways.
“It’s hard to come to terms with our violent nature,” intones Wilson Fisk (Vincent D’Onofrio) to Matt in the premiere during their first face-to-face in years. Like Matt, Fisk has popped up here and there throughout the MCU prior to now, with his campaign to become New York’s mayor born from his distaste of all vigilantes post-Echo. In Born Again, the former Kingpin is struggling at being a legitimate man in New York and all that entails as its mayor. The most interesting moments of his story aren’t the ups and downs of his mayoral life, but the quieter scenes between him and his wife Vanessa (Ayelet Zurer). Their relationship takes on interesting shades as the show digs into how his absence affected her and the ways in which they are defined and potentially undone by their love for one another.
Restraint is a key theme for several of Daredevil: Born Again’s main players and the show itself. The show was famously reworked from its original version envisioned by then-showrunners Matt Corman and Chris Ord, whose influence is felt throughout the first four episodes. Initially, fight scenes are minimal, which feels like an intentional choice to convey how much Matt and Fisk are trying not to slip back into their old ways. Instead, there’s a bigger focus placed on New York through journalist BB Urich’s (Genneya Walton) news channel, where citizens give their thoughts on Fisk’s mayorship or the place vigilantes like Daredevil and White Tiger (Kamar de los Reyes) have in the city. It’s all very on the nose, but it makes the MCU’s version of New York feel the most alive and real it has in some time, and works perfectly for the array of street-level heroes and villains pulled into the show’s orbit.
It’s in the series’ second half where it feels like current showrunner Dario Scardapane has full control and Born Again begins to fully turn Matt loose. Its action is more frequent and contains several impressive beats, and by season’s end, several ideas established in earlier episodes pay off in interesting, usually satisfying ways. The most refreshing thing about Born Again is how Scardapane and the rest of the team know what the ending is and how to get there. But it doesn’t go too big or try to overextend itself: it’s a show about Matt Murdock above all else, and his unshakable desire to help his city, whether that’s as a lawyer or his acrobatic alter ego.
What’s here in Daredevil: Born Again’s first season will undoubtedly feel compromised, but it remains worthwhile for its eventual highs and Cox and D’Onofrio taking center stage once again. The show and character remain very good at what they set out to do, and here’s hoping for stronger, more fully realized season two.
Daredevil: Born Again airs new episodes Tuesday nights on Disney+.
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