Marvel Won’t Let Daredevil: Born Again Live

It doesn’t take long for the promising revival to crumble into another incoherent mess of IP management. Photo: Disney+

A decade ago, before Marvel consolidated its Hollywood endeavors under Kevin Feige’s Infinity Gauntlet–clad fist, Netflix pumped out a string of streaming series, later collectively christened “The Defenders,” that provided a distinctly different vision for what the quippy MCU blockbusters could look like onscreen: character-driven, grounded, violent. Daredevil, released in April 2015, was a grimdark organized-crime drama about a blind lawyer grappling with mobsters, rage, and his Catholic faith after developing heightened senses from radioactive-chemical exposure. Later that year, the first season of the legitimately great Jessica Jones delivered a bona fide serial-killer thriller that explored how the genre would play out if both cat and mouse had superhuman abilities. However, by the time the actual Defenders crossover series rolled out in 2017, braiding the first two shows with the solid Luke Cage and the absolutely terrible Iron Fist, the whole thing came to feel the strain of Netflix bloat.

With Daredevil: Born Again, Marvel appears to be trying to resurrect the potent vibes of those early Netflix innings for an MCU/Disney+ television enterprise weighed down by an increasingly terrible batting average. (Yes, there’s irony in Marvel working to counter MCU bloat by reaching back to a happier time before Netflix bloat.) Born Again gives you enough blood, sweat, and tears in its opening episode to suggest that maybe, just maybe, we’re so back. But it doesn’t take long for the promising revival to crumble once more into another incoherent mess of IP management.

Daredevil fans should ignore the Born Again section of the title, as the revival carries little to nothing of that iconic Frank Miller story line from the comics. (The Netflix series mined elements for its third season anyway.) Instead, it refers to the way the show softly resets Matt Murdock (Charlie Cox) with a preface establishing a foundation-shaking tragedy I can’t talk about given Disney’s strictness with plot embargoes. The series then cuts to a year later, where we find Murdock some way into a new life. He’s retired from the vigilante game. He’s in mourning. His core found family, made up of Karen Page (Deborah Ann Woll) and Foggy Nelson (Elden Henson), has effectively dissolved. But things aren’t completely terrible for the Hell’s Kitchen lawyer. Having partnered up with former district attorney Kirsten McDuffie (Nikki M. James), Murdock heads a new firm out of a start-up-cool office, driven by a belief to do good purely through the justice system. He’s even dating again.

Meanwhile, his nemesis, the criminal lord Wilson Fisk (Vincent D’Onofrio), born again in his own way following the events of Hawkeye and Echo, mounts a run for the New York City mayoral office. Here, Murdock and Fisk mirror each other in their attempts to transcend their most base selves: in Murdock’s case, to fight the desire to pull on the mask and whoop ass when the justice system fails; in Fisk’s, the desire to whip out his fists and whoop ass when the city machinery fails to bend to his will. Of course, it’s only a matter of time and several elaborate plot machinations — here involving a serial killer, the trial of another vigilante, the rising threat of rogue cops, stuff carrying over from earlier shows that you may or may not remember, and so much more — before things spin out of control, forcing Murdock and Fisk to rub up against their inner natures. In many senses, Born Again is a season-long expansion of the Bugs Bunny “Lord Forgive Me” meme.

Though shaggy and campy in places, the Netflix series, created by Drew Goddard, was always interesting in its fixation on Murdock’s Catholicism-laced relationship with pain and rage. This didn’t just come through in self-serious dialogue (“How do you know the angel and the devil inside me aren’t the same thing?”) but also a hearty embrace of violence weaponized to great effect. Murdock is a dude who willingly bleeds and breaks his body for salvation, almost to a point where it’s erotic, and one of the truly great ways the series expressed this was through bravura fight sequences that found their apex in the third season’s ten-minute prison-fight oner. It could all be so much, but Daredevil was a fine example of how a determined marriage of theme and mechanics could produce something greater than the sum of its parts. Unfortunately, Born Again showrunners Dario Scardapane (The Punisher), Matt Corman, and Chris Ord don’t commit to that same marriage, and while you might see traces of the original Daredevil’s DNA — the violence, the grimness, the fixation on pain — they feel like little more than aesthetic nods. There are fight sequences, but aside from the opening throwdown that kicks off Born Again, they are nowhere as interesting as the original, and they certainly do not advance character. The graphic viscera doesn’t feel like it’s servicing a greater idea about the brutality of its world. There is lots and lots of talk about pain, but you don’t really buy it from anybody saying it.

Born Again simply doesn’t work as a continuation of the Marvel television project or an entry point for anyone new. The season’s narrative treads no new ground for any of our main characters, which will frustrate anybody who enters Born Again studied in everything that has come before, from the Netflix series to The Punisher spinoff to Echo. And yet, because the show requires quite a bit of prior knowledge for viewers to truly know what’s going on, particularly in the back half of the season, Born Again ends up suffering the exact same malady afflicting every other inch of the MCU enterprise. Just when you thought it wouldn’t adhere to that default need to service the broader cinematic universe, a mid-season suitcase episode features a bank heist and a secondary character whose primary function is to remind you that you’re watching one tiny morsel of a larger story.

The series has its pleasures, but they are either marginal to the action or purely accidental. Michael Gandolfini pops up as a slimy Fisk mayoral staffer who wouldn’t look out of place in this magazine’s recent cover featuring the new young right, and his playing both pathetic and vaguely sympathetic is very fun to watch. Jon Bernthal returns for a few stretches as Frank Castle, a.k.a. the Punisher, turning in a performance so masc and coked-up, it’s sublime. The series also features an exceptionally caricatured vision of New York, communicating its idea of this very real, very complicated, and very wackadoo city with all the nuance of a Times Square tourist. It’s the kind of show that lets you know a character is a salt-of-the-earth New Yorker by making him list out the Rangers, the Jets, and the Mets in one breath. Also unintentionally funny is Born Again’s handling of Fisk’s political career, which has all the depth and sophistication of a stick-figure drawing. The dinkiness would be charming if its laziness weren’t so annoying.

The most painful thing about Born Again is how it reminds you that things could be different. The news that Marvel was bringing Daredevil back into its modern-television enterprise suggested the possibility of an alternate path for these projects: that the MCU could, perhaps, carve out a pocket space to re-create the grounded, self-contained punches the best of the Netflix-era series delivered. We should be asking more of Marvel’s television endeavors. We live in a world where HBO’s Watchmen exists, and we’re still rolling off a year that gave us The Penguin, which is just about the best possible outcome for a corporate mandate to make lemonade out of intellectual-property lemons. There is a path forward for Marvel to make interesting television. It just needs to let a revival like Born Again actually live.